Long before the storm came, and floodwaters barged into her home, Joan Bennett remembers how she would go into the woods and find beautiful mushrooms. She dug them up, and, with her mother’s permission, planted the fungi in her family’s basement. It was the late 1950s, not long after her family moved from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to Westchester County, just north of New York City, and Bennett would have died if any of her friends from high school knew what she was doing. Through trial and error, Bennett learned that if you watered fungi like any old flowering plant, the organisms turned to slime and died. These clandestine attempts at cultivating mushrooms, trying to find the right conditions to make them flourish, were some of the earliest experiments she conducted—the prescientific days, she says, just messing around. In retrospect, it was one of her first steps on a lifelong path that would weave together a love of science and a love of fungi.
In 1963, while she was applying to graduate schools after getting a degree in biology from New Jersey’s Upsala College, Bennett received a course catalog from the University of Chicago. Flipping through the catalog to see what courses were offered by the botany department, the words “fungal genetics” caught her eye. She decided she wanted to be a fungal geneticist, a decision that put her at odds with the prevailing values of both molecular biology and womanhood at the time. Instead of finding a husband and having kids and doing, as she says, “whatever it was that women were supposed to do back in the 1950s,” or focusing on E. coli or phage—two trendy organisms in that field at the time—she became a scientist who studied mold.
Mold is a filamentous form of fungi that often resembles bruise-dark discolorations or cottony tufts of blue or white threads. There is, as the Centers for Disease Control notes, “always a little mold everywhere”—the types number in the hundreds of thousands, creating the flavor of blue cheese or appearing on shower curtains and loaves of bread. Over the past few years, though, the American public has increasingly seen mold as a toxic presence in their homes.
In that context, many people view mold as unsightly, unhealthy, potentially lethal. Mold is scary.
This is not a totally new reputation for mold, and it can be malevolent: certain species produce aflatoxins that can contaminate foods with some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to science. But for most of Bennett’s life, she has seen mold as a positive force. She recognizes its marvelous creations: cheese, soy sauce, rice wine, and all sorts of drugs, ranging from cholesterol-lowering statins to penicillin, the landmark antibiotic. Her relationship with it took a turn after Bennett, like so many of us, saw it blanket almost every surface inside her house, clinging to curtains and carpets, lurking inside and around walls and floors and everything in between. What Bennett saw, and experienced, changed the trajectory of her life. Thanks to our changing climate, we almost certainly will be living with more mold, in one way or another, in the future. “There’s so much more flooding than there used to be,” says Bennett, who is now 76 and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “Rivers that haven’t flooded for 100 years are flooding every 5 years. The sea level is rising and it’s getting warmer.”
It’s an overcast Tuesday in September, with the humidity nearing 100 percent and a category 4 hurricane called Florence barreling toward the Southeast United States. All signs point toward damp, moisture-laden conditions, ideal for incubating molds. Most people avoid both molds and the ecological crevices that they inhabit—underneath floorboards, below kitchen sinks, in basements and crawlspaces. But Bill Sothern seeks them out. Sothern, 72, is a former Army medic turned certified industrial hygienist, a New York-based professional who assesses the health and safety of homes and workplaces. Today he and I are speeding down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in a gold Volvo packed with metal canisters, vacuum pumps, and Air-O-Cell sampling cassettes. We’re heading to his first inspection site of the afternoon: an apartment occupied by a 35-year-old woman who claims she’s getting sick on account of sharing her living quarters with mold. “The landlord is going to be there,” Sothern warned me. “He is our adversary.”
Sothern runs Microecologies, a firm based in East Harlem that conducts indoor air-quality investigations. All day long, his cell phone rings as he fields calls from people in and around New York City asking him to verify their concerns about mold contamination. The vast majority of the time, Sothern says, he and his staff of ten find their clients’ health concerns about mold to be well-founded. Visible or measurable amounts of mold in damp, indoor environments have been associated with an increased risk of pulmonary disorders such as asthma, according to the World Health Organization. Beyond that, the field is dogged by controversy at every turn. Among mainstream scientists and industrial hygienists, the consensus is that although some molds produce the unhealthy substances known as mycotoxins, they are not ordinarily found in high enough concentrations to cause health problems in humans.
“The dose that would be required to provoke a toxic effect in humans would be so high that it would be unreasonable,” Sothern explains. “That’s where the scientific mainstream is. You go outside that and you make a lot of people skeptical about you.” The process of getting rid of mold can attract opportunists, but he sees himself as one of the good guys—someone who acknowledges legitimate fears and collects evidence. That evidence, Sothern admits, is mostly anecdotal. Of the connection between health outcomes and infestations of Stachybotrys, which is commonly known as toxic black mold, he says, “There’s just no data.”
by Peter Andrey Smith, Topic | Read more:
Image: Christopher Gregory
In 1963, while she was applying to graduate schools after getting a degree in biology from New Jersey’s Upsala College, Bennett received a course catalog from the University of Chicago. Flipping through the catalog to see what courses were offered by the botany department, the words “fungal genetics” caught her eye. She decided she wanted to be a fungal geneticist, a decision that put her at odds with the prevailing values of both molecular biology and womanhood at the time. Instead of finding a husband and having kids and doing, as she says, “whatever it was that women were supposed to do back in the 1950s,” or focusing on E. coli or phage—two trendy organisms in that field at the time—she became a scientist who studied mold. Mold is a filamentous form of fungi that often resembles bruise-dark discolorations or cottony tufts of blue or white threads. There is, as the Centers for Disease Control notes, “always a little mold everywhere”—the types number in the hundreds of thousands, creating the flavor of blue cheese or appearing on shower curtains and loaves of bread. Over the past few years, though, the American public has increasingly seen mold as a toxic presence in their homes.
In that context, many people view mold as unsightly, unhealthy, potentially lethal. Mold is scary.
This is not a totally new reputation for mold, and it can be malevolent: certain species produce aflatoxins that can contaminate foods with some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to science. But for most of Bennett’s life, she has seen mold as a positive force. She recognizes its marvelous creations: cheese, soy sauce, rice wine, and all sorts of drugs, ranging from cholesterol-lowering statins to penicillin, the landmark antibiotic. Her relationship with it took a turn after Bennett, like so many of us, saw it blanket almost every surface inside her house, clinging to curtains and carpets, lurking inside and around walls and floors and everything in between. What Bennett saw, and experienced, changed the trajectory of her life. Thanks to our changing climate, we almost certainly will be living with more mold, in one way or another, in the future. “There’s so much more flooding than there used to be,” says Bennett, who is now 76 and a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “Rivers that haven’t flooded for 100 years are flooding every 5 years. The sea level is rising and it’s getting warmer.”
It’s an overcast Tuesday in September, with the humidity nearing 100 percent and a category 4 hurricane called Florence barreling toward the Southeast United States. All signs point toward damp, moisture-laden conditions, ideal for incubating molds. Most people avoid both molds and the ecological crevices that they inhabit—underneath floorboards, below kitchen sinks, in basements and crawlspaces. But Bill Sothern seeks them out. Sothern, 72, is a former Army medic turned certified industrial hygienist, a New York-based professional who assesses the health and safety of homes and workplaces. Today he and I are speeding down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in a gold Volvo packed with metal canisters, vacuum pumps, and Air-O-Cell sampling cassettes. We’re heading to his first inspection site of the afternoon: an apartment occupied by a 35-year-old woman who claims she’s getting sick on account of sharing her living quarters with mold. “The landlord is going to be there,” Sothern warned me. “He is our adversary.”
Sothern runs Microecologies, a firm based in East Harlem that conducts indoor air-quality investigations. All day long, his cell phone rings as he fields calls from people in and around New York City asking him to verify their concerns about mold contamination. The vast majority of the time, Sothern says, he and his staff of ten find their clients’ health concerns about mold to be well-founded. Visible or measurable amounts of mold in damp, indoor environments have been associated with an increased risk of pulmonary disorders such as asthma, according to the World Health Organization. Beyond that, the field is dogged by controversy at every turn. Among mainstream scientists and industrial hygienists, the consensus is that although some molds produce the unhealthy substances known as mycotoxins, they are not ordinarily found in high enough concentrations to cause health problems in humans.
“The dose that would be required to provoke a toxic effect in humans would be so high that it would be unreasonable,” Sothern explains. “That’s where the scientific mainstream is. You go outside that and you make a lot of people skeptical about you.” The process of getting rid of mold can attract opportunists, but he sees himself as one of the good guys—someone who acknowledges legitimate fears and collects evidence. That evidence, Sothern admits, is mostly anecdotal. Of the connection between health outcomes and infestations of Stachybotrys, which is commonly known as toxic black mold, he says, “There’s just no data.”
by Peter Andrey Smith, Topic | Read more:
Image: Christopher Gregory
[ed. Its effects might be mostly anecdotal but try selling a house with mold and you will definitely experience major headaches.]
