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Hackers, Mason Jars, and the Psychedelic Science of DIY Shrooms

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Joanna Steinhardt

Ideas
02.12.2021 08:00 AM

Hackers, Mason Jars, and the Psychedelic Science of DIY Shrooms

The history of home cultivation methods of Psilocybe is more
connected to early internet culture than you'd think.

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Illustration: WIRED; Getty Images

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It began with a Mason jar. It was wide-mouthed and translucent, good
for air flow and the visual inspection of radial growth. The year was
1975 and Dennis McKenna, then a starry-eyed 25-year-old, was on a
mission to grow magic mushrooms. An article in the academic journal
Mycologia by a researcher who had grown button mushrooms for genetic
analysis had given him the idea to use the household item as a
vessel. It was small scale, affordable, reusable, and inconspicuous,
plus he could buy it at any grocery store. He filled it with rye
grain for a substrate, sterilized it, and inoculated the rye with
spores he'd brought back from Ecuador and germinated on agar. And
then he hoped for the best. It was a weighty undertaking; these
spores were from mushrooms that had revealed cosmic truths to Dennis
and his brother, Terence. Dennis wrote in his memoir some 40 years
later, "We wanted a steady supply so we could easily revisit those
dimensions; more importantly we wanted others to have their own
experiences as a way of testing ours."

Joanna Steinhardt is an anthropologist and writer living in Oakland,
California.
Ideas Contributor

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