🍄 For our Food Issue cover story, MikeSula investigates something magic growing at Back of the Yards Algae Sciences. 🧪 An unlikely team of bioprospectors is experimenting with the green stuff, psychedelic mushrooms, and toxic toads.
“He hands me a bag of this blue powder and says, ‘Here, see what this does.’ I don’t even really understand what it is, but I bring it back to Tony. He mixes it up with some media to make petri dishes, and also mixes it up with some water to mist the mushrooms. The stuff in the petri dishes grew really fast, and we also noticed that it was making little points of mushrooms grow straightaway. It was totally fucking amazing.
Pleckham reported back to Lerer, who was working toward patenting his phycocyanin as an agricultural biostimulant. He invited Pleckham and Milewski to replicate their petri dish experiments in the controlled environment of the lab. The results were equally impressive, but at first they were circumspect about every variety they were growing.
But Lerer is a voracious reader, and he began to devour the research until he was ready to take a serious risk and bounce the story off of his older brother, Dr. Bernard Lerer, a retired but still active internationally esteemed neuropsychopharmacologist and psychiatry professor at Hadassah-Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The brothers decided to join forces, the younger Lerer to develop production in Chicago, the older to run trials on mice at Hadassah BrainLabs, the research laboratory he founded. They launched a new company to raise money, naming it for Parow, the Cape Town suburb where they grew up. When Lerer introduced me to Milewski as the head of mycology for BYAS and Parow, he draped his arm around the younger man and declared, “This is my brother.” The feeling is mutual, but they’re an unlikely pair. Milewski, a natty vintage dresser, has no formal scientific training, but he does have a spiritual reverence for all fungi, and fervently believes that it can save the world.
Pleckham, who, along with Milewksi has an ownership stake in Parow, is the lab’s jack of all trades. He does have a scientific degree in brewing technology from the Siebel Institute of Technology, one of the many skills he draws on to put his hands in nearly every project. trip than dried ones. “It’s like playing a note on headphones on a Casio keyboard, compared to playing that same note on a grand piano in a concert hall,” says Pleckham. “It’s the same frequency, there’s just more there.”
“Dried mushrooms are considered to be very dark,” said Milewski. “Things can get extremely introspective—people hiding in tents. You know, bad trips. That’s not a rare thing, but I’ve never seen that happen with a fresh mushroom.” They also have Blakolmer, who “righted the ship” when she came on board, according to Milewski. She used her long experience in clinical development to tighten the budget, forecast future needs, keep the company in regulatory compliance, and place timelines on Bernard Lerer’s preclinical experiments.
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