Stachybotrys chartarum’s Transpacific Migrations

• In Event: The Edible, the Moldy, and the Weedy: Speculative and Materialist Interventions into (Evading) Capitalist Capture

Abstract

In her presentation, Rachel Lee revisits the filamentous fungi Stachybotrys chartarum, said to be responsible for horses (between 1920 and 1940) in Russia and Hungary becoming ill after eating moldy hay. Fifty years later (in 1993-4) Stachybotrys was linked to outbreaks of pulmonary distress in African American infants living in water-damaged houses in Cleveland. This presentation examines the entanglement of military exploits, racialized residential patterns, and frontiers of new drug research by way of the perceptible travels of Stachybotrys. From the outset, US research into cellulose-eating fungi was linked to transnational endeavors. That is, concerns of the U.S. military over the compressed serviceable life of their tarps, tents, and sandbags, while stationed in Southeast Asia, led to the creation of a massive collection of cultures from fungi taken from “deteriorated materials from military bases from the Pacific” (J. Miller, et al, 2003), housed at the US Army Quartermaster Laboratories. A class of metabolites of S. chartarum--spirocylic drimanes--were also patented by Japanese researchers as a potential immunosuppresant. While English-language mainstream media interest in Stachybotrys has centered upon its possible role as a contributor to “indoor mold” and DBRI (damp-building realted illness), or what Michelle Murphy calls “sick-building syndrome,” a transnational lens onto the filamentous fungi reveals the way in which Stachybotrys research has recently transited to a further oceanic milieux: the spirocyclic drimanes of the marine classes of the fungi (class: Sordariomycetes, order: Hypocreales), being mined for their novel bioactive chemicals and for potential capitalization by the drug industry.

Author

• Rachel C Lee, UCLA Center for the Study of Women