In this episode of Art &, we go on a field trip—literally and metaphorically—with synthetic biologist Drew Endy and artist-mycologist Phil Ross, founder of the Open Fung initiative. What starts as a visit to a mushroom farm turns into a deeper conversation about how fungi could transform the way we think about materials, sustainability, and the role of interdisciplinary collaboration.
From building leather-like textiles from mycelium to reimagining how bioengineering can be more democratic, Drew and Phil explore how fungi offer more than just a biological solution—they offer a cultural shift. Together, they show how artists and scientists can work side-by-side to prototype more ethical, regenerative, and connected futures.
Featured Guests: Phil Ross & Drew Endy
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Credits
Host: Ellen Oh
Creator/Producer/Editor: Taylor Jones
Production Support: Edi Dai
Sound Designer and Mix Engineer: Chase Everett
Theme song and Music: Juana Izuzquiza
Executive Producers: Ellen Oh and Anne Shulock
Artwork: Connie Ko
Special thanks to Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts
Hello and welcome to Art & where we explore the unexpected spaces where creativity meets research, and where artists think alongside engineers, scientists, and scholars to imagine new futures
On today’s episode, an artist-mycologist and a synthetic biologist go on a field trip… and end up rethinking the future of materials — through mushrooms.
Drew Endy: And so now I'm starting to think of, well, what if I could grind up a tree and make a new tree? What if I wanted a mature oak tree and I don't have 72 years to wait, I got 72 hours.
Phil Ross: Anywhere that you're using things now that are synthetically or artificially made from plastics or petroleum, we can synthetically or artificially make them from mushrooms, but in a way that is much more in line with what we want from the world and what we want to leave behind.
If you haven’t heard of Open Fung — it’s an initiative being incubated in Drew Endy’s Lab at Stanford using open science to imagine a new kind of materials economy. One that’s decentralized, sustainable, and built from the bottom up… literally, from mycelium.
It’s an effort that grew out of a moment more than a decade ago, when Drew Endy and Phil Ross first crossed paths. That early encounter sparked a shared fascination with the potential of fungi — not just as material, but as metaphor.
Phil is a mycologist, artist, and founder of MycoWorks. Drew is a synthetic biologist and Stanford professor. Together, they’re experimenting with how open collaboration between artists and scientists might unlock more ethical, adaptable, and regenerative futures.
I wanted to chat with them because their collaboration doesn’t just ask what we can make — it asks how we can make things differently, with more care, more creativity, and more connection to living systems.
So with that, here’s our conversation with Drew & Phil.
Phil Ross (00:08:37): I'm Phil Ross. I'm one of the co-founders of a group called Open Fung, which is a nonprofit institution created to advance bioengineering of fungi as well as their materials and the arts. And so we are starting out here at Stanford in the formation of this new institution to figure out how to do what we want to do and who wants to play with us.
Drew Endy (09:05): But before that…
Phil Ross (09:06): Yeah, I founded a company called MycoWorks about 12 years ago, which came out of my art-making practice. And now MycoWorks has 400-plus employees and is manufacturing a leather analog that is grown out of fungus, the tissue out of fungus. And so this is done with a greatly reduced energy and material inputs and doesn't create pollution and in fact, but ultimately satisfies a lot of supply chain issues too.
Ellen Oh (09:41): And before that, you were a Stanford student?
Phil Ross (09:45): I was a Stanford student. I got my MFA here in 1999 from the Fine Arts Department. I have a master's in sculpture (laughs).
Drew Endy (00:10:09): Yeah, I'm Drew Endy. I'm a bioengineer here at Stanford. I've been on the faculty since about 2008, so that's my day job. I also help out with other things, so I help out with the d. School also help out with a lot of policy work. So both at Freeman Spokey through CISAC and also more recently through the Hoover where I lead something called BSL. Bio Strategies and Leadership. And our job over there is to help people understand biology as a strategic domain and act accordingly.
Ellen Oh: I’m curious how you guys met in the first place.
Phil Ross (00:11:05): Yeah, I think it was really interesting because when I came to Drew's lab, I think about eight years ago as a visiting artist, maybe it was a visiting scholar title.
Phil Ross (00:11:26): But you really introduced me to the iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machines culture and that whole scene as well as the syn-bio gathering that we went to in Singapore.
Phil Ross (00:11:44): So those were two areas where people were making a lot of stuff with biology under the kind of guidance of synthetic biology as an ideological principle of how to practice this form of bioengineering. And that was really interesting to me because there were hundreds, if not thousands of these practitioners.
Drew Endy (00:12:05): There were a thousand people there.
Phil Ross (12:12): it was just so interesting to meet this mostly young group of people at the iGem thing, undergraduates and graduate students mostly who are all working to figure out how to systematize working with biology to actually make stuff. And again, this was something completely... I had to approach it almost anthropologically because it was such an alien culture. They were speaking in English, but I didn't understand anything they were talking about or what their value systems were or anything.
And I just sort of sat in that, it was going to your group meetings here at Stanford or kind of visiting all these places and listening and just kind of figuring out how this international grouping of people from academia, science, the arts, all this kind of thing like that were creating this new language in international language of how to work with biology that seemed incredibly egalitarian and democratic and based on the excellence that a person would bring meritocracy.
Like, you really introduced me to that. And then just figuring where can I sit in this world? Where is creativity and design and communications? These people value that, but how would I adapt my skill sets or my knowledge into this group of people because they're actually receptive and willing to listen and all that.
It's very different than the art world in a lot of ways, whereas the art world kind of validates or valorizes geniuses and individuality in science. It is absolutely about the group and of placing yourself within this community of people and everybody has to be cited and you have to refer to your teachers and to everybody else. And so that just feels really healthy and something that the art world, I think could borrow because it would make it a lot more welcoming to a wider group of people who want to participate there as well.
Ellen Oh (15:42): You point out something that I think is really important in doing interdisciplinary work and collaborative work is the ability to speak multiple languages. And that makes such a difference to be able to understand the other fields' jargon and terms, because it is, they're very different worlds.
Drew Endy (16:11): All those movies where extraterrestrials, humanity interact for the first time, and sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't go well. Sometimes the communication and relationship is established, sometimes not. It goes well in a movie when both sides want to figure out how to communicate. And I've had so many experiences where there's an unfortunate asymmetry, one side wants to communicate, but the other side doesn’t. I want you to learn my jargon, but I'm not going to learn yours. That works for a while, then it blows up. But what Phil is reminding me of is, first off, how good he is and sophisticated and enthusiastic in doing that, like sustained, "I'm going to figure you out. I'm going to figure out the words you're using and I'm going to teach you my words and I'll do it in ways that are subtle," so that it won't trigger an immune response, and I'll get you hooked! I just really appreciate that.
Ellen Oh: You were mentioning before we started there was a fateful field trip that kicked off your work together. Can you tell us about that?
Drew Endy (17:33): So in 2013, finally we've connected somehow really. He's like, "we're going on a field trip, let's go." And so we get in the car and we drive down to Monterey, to the agricultural fields, strawberry fields, and we're going to visit a family farm. That is…
Phil Ross (17:57): Far West..
Drew Endy (17:57): Far West fungi right now. I kind of had heard of Far West Fungi up in the farmer's market, fancy farmer's market in the city. But this is where they come from. And we're just walking around and it's in the middle of the strawberry fields, but it is not a strawberry field farm. It's a mushroom farm, and there's big piles of wood chips and sawdust. And I'm like, huh? And then there's an outdoor autoclave pressure cooker, and then there's this conveyor belt of bags of sterilized wood chips, right, and they're getting mixed with some liquidy stuff like a liquid inoculum.
And then there's an open shed but dark rack of these things. Like loaves of bread proofing. And then there are these fruiting racks where weird stuff happens. We're having this tour with the son of the owners. I'm just like, what is going on? And we're gazing at these fruiting bodies coming out of these mycelial loafs, and it's like, “Wow, I've never seen anything like this!” And then they're harvested and they're cleaned up and presented very artfully in these beautiful cardboard boxes and brought to market. And I'm like, “What? I'm eating wood chips!”
Drew Endy (19:24): For me, mind blowing at so many levels. First off, in bioengineering land, I've been taught that there was no… Biofuels turning wood into ethanol, that doesn't compete with food. Like, biofuels and food don't compete. That does not compute. I'm actually eating wood chips. My world was being reset. And so now I'm starting to think of, well, what if I could grind up a tree and make a new tree? What if I wanted a mature oak tree and I don't have 72 years to wait, I got 72 hours.
That field trip changed my world, not just at the personal level. Completely blew up some assumptions I had completely. You know, taught me how over and over again, homo sapiens take materials and remake materials so we can reshape materials so we can make new things. And I'm trying to be pretty careful to no longer think about that as a divide between the human and nature, but now that's just kind of what's happening. So a lot was going on for me in that field trip.
Ellen Oh: Phil, did Drew’s reaction to all of this surprise you at all?
Phil Ross (21:47): It's interesting because I think that maybe that trepidation that scientists feel about being creative, of coming up with synthetic ideas, which is what creativity often is, bringing things together into some new configuration. But like, artists are trained to be okay with those feelings. It's like that you are taken through this course of practice of failing a lot or even dissolving that idea of failure. And I don't know that that training really comes about to a person creatively in bioengineering to deal with their own creativity or again, the ramifications or this might not work and that's okay too as opposed to this better work. As opposed to, “this better work!” Or I have so much riding on this being a success versus it's just like, a version and another version and another version.
Ellen Oh: Sustainability is at the core of your work with both MycoWorks and Open Fung. Why are mushrooms so key to our future?
Phil Ross (43:38): We generate a huge amount of organic material as a result of farming, of processing, of cardboard recycling. These are all organic materials, and there's huge concern about them turning into pollution and ending up in places or even in just, again… the energy it takes to ameliorate them or deal with them at the end of their lives. And mushrooms are great at eating things. Yes, they can eat wood chips, but they can also eat cardboard or anything that has lignin in them, which is one of the most recalcitrant and also plentiful proteins on the planet. You can turn these into a gourmet, high-priced food locally without having to ship it around the world or use kind of fertilizers on it or add chemicals to it in some type of way.
Open Fung, this non-profit is working on… How do you make your car parts out of this? Also in addition to food or maybe making your leather coat or even a medical implant or your cell phone, these are the possibilities.
Ellen Oh: I know that you along with Courtney Fink started Open Fung with a mission to advance fungi technology, materials and the arts.…. Can you tell us more about what Open Fung is and what you’re trying to accomplish through it?
Phil Ross: Anywhere that you're using things now that are synthetically or artificially made from plastics or petroleum, we can synthetically or artificially make them from mushrooms, but in a way that is much more in line with what we want from the world and what we want to leave behind. So we're figuring out who to play with, and that involves some of the people from the bioengineering department. Some are from design, some are from the law school, some are from the business school. So we found that there are a lot of people really interested in solving problems that exist, these outstanding, enormous problems. But just making that step forward of saying, this is what we're doing. This is what Open Fung is doing. We are creating these solutions. And again, just sort of putting that out clearly what our objectives are. And then we've been able to find the folks who really want to join in doing that, and just all sorts of skill sets. So it's not even fungus, but data science people or machine vision people or even accounting or policy or all this sort of stuff. It’s like all this stuff relates.
Phil Ross (40:02): You don't have to have a scientific degree or even much beyond a 10th grade understanding of the world in terms of your education. So that's amazing. And we've seen in our workshops that we can work with kids as young as six and eight years old who just immediately figure out how to work with mushrooms to make objects and things like that.
Phil Ross (40:58): So that's what we're exporting to make it really easy for a lot of people to start to work with mushrooms so that the entire globe can rise up to that all at the same time. And so we can work on a network effect. The great thing about biological information now is that it can be sent around at the speed of data, and then people can print that out wherever they are or start to use that data in ways. So using globally networked information so that people can produce things locally with mushrooms, including textiles, food, spaceships. I don’t know, like anything.
Drew Endy: Canoes.
Phil Ross: And canoes, yes!
Drew Endy (42:19): In the Intro to Synthetic Aesthetics, we give an example. So in Menlo Park, the compost gets picked up, you know this is the woody material that the citizens of Menlo Park pay to get rid of. And it's like 500 pounds per person, per year. And this material is a type of battery. We think about batteries for electrical things, but wood is a battery and it's storing this energy and matter. And when Phil talks about mushrooms, mushrooms access this battery. So imagine if the people of Menlo Park, each person could grow 500 pounds of stuff from their garden clippings. For free! And it's not only sustainability. There's another dimension to this, which is agency and freedom and democracy, because you could do it by yourself. It's personal technology or personal mycological capacity. It's interesting. We don't have all the names yet, but it's not just sustainability, it's also freedom.
Phil Ross (45:48): Mushrooms really satisfy a lot of what we imagine that we want from bioengineering of cleaner water, less energy that we're producing, less pollution that we're making, and yes, agency, the ability to not have to worry about something being shipped from around the world and unclear of the working conditions. So it gives a huge transparency, but I also think at a more primary level that the people who come together to work on mushrooms, that group creates meaning. And it is like all these different expertise, all those different people who have to actually center around some subject that is meaningful and wholesome to them. That's medicine or community or whatever you call it.
Drew Endy: Movement.
Phil Ross: Yeah, it's a movement. Yes, it's a movement. It gives so much to the people to know that they're working on something good when they get up, and that's a mission, and that is more powerful, again, more than any material outcome. It's that people create something meaningful in what they're doing in their lives.
Phil Ross: All these people from all these different departments and all these different areas show up around the mushroom and folks that I wouldn't necessarily meet otherwise or have the chance to work with, and they're all attracted to that. I think that that's what Stanford does really well. It takes these vague cultural suspicions and then formalizes them into an actual course of study or a building or a group of people actually making it real.
Ellen Oh: Drew, I’m curious how you see your role in supporting things like Open Fung and this kind of interdisciplinary work?
Drew Endy (01:03:56): What does it mean to be a faculty member at Stanford? Right? And there's many different ways to be a faculty member at Stanford. I have educational responsibilities and scholarship, but also I have a lab, which means I have a space and a space and an incredibly privileged perch with amazing people. And interdisciplinary-ness. it's a full service university. I don't know of others that are like it unfortunately. Where's our backup copy on Earth somewhere else? But because of that, what's my responsibility? So we've got 1500 square feet in the Shriram Center, in the middle of campus, and if amazing students show up, they get to dance. Like, here's the conversation I have with PhD students. What projects do you have in your lab? I'm like, “I don't know. What do you want to work on? Because it's your lab.” Not every lab's like that, but that's my little niche. And so my job as a faculty member with the privilege and gifts that we have here at Stanford is to give people who want to create improbable futures a chance opportunity. And so Open Fung’s an easy, “Yes.”
Ellen Oh: It’s about making those connections. It’s hard to find spaces where the two come together.
Drew Endy (32:21): Not to toot our own horn. Stanford is one of those improbable places where it's not easy, but we have a chance.
Phil Ross: Agreed.
Drew Endy: It's really interesting how what we have here is not to be taken for granted, and it's not easy here, but it's possible. Most places it's almost impossibly hard.
Ellen Oh (32:38): Yeah
Phil Ross: I would agree with that. Yeah. I think it's probably just because of the entrepreneurial history of this area that you cannot discount any new idea so easily, or that might be to your great loss if you don't recognize novelty as a value.
Drew Endy (33:42): There's a multitude of frontiers and the fact that we have critical mass strength across the arts and humanities allows for totally different things. So when this idea drops four centuries ago in Europe, I think therefore I am, that's a disruptive product at the culture layer, and it's suddenly like everybody could be capable of reason. And that then puts in motion what has a chance of being a liberal democracy, if we can keep it right? Across the campus, we have opportunities of innovation that are not just in the tech land.
Ellen Oh: I want to ask both of you, why is it important to bridge disciplines and work with people outside of your own fields of practice.
Drew Endy (55:51): Being alive? Collaborating across disciplines for me is about being alive, remaining alive, intellectually, emotionally. There's so much to learn. I think as we've been discussing just organically, the examples just keep flowing out of how would I ever have known that? And so for people who care and dare to learn, it's a joy and don't know a better way to go about it.
Ellen Oh (56:23): But it's crucial to be open to it, as you said before.
Drew Endy (56:27): Not extractive, not extractive, but genuinely and…
Ellen Oh (56:30): Curious.
Drew Endy (56:30): Symmetrically engaged and lead with empathy.
Phil Ross (56:33): Yeah, I think it's very difficult to implement as a program because as we pointed out, it might take eight years to actually learn the language and to become conversant enough and comfortable enough to actually act in a field that you don't belong in.
Drew Endy (56:51): As a pro tip. Here's just something to think about, especially if you're a student, take one course in the thing. In the thing you know nothing about just as a placeholder to get your visa, your passport, permission to go over there later to get that little beachhead, and then if you end up going over there, you want to go native, you're going to have to spend more time on it.
Phil Ross (57:12): I think I supported myself as a professional chef for a very long time, and one of the fields you can get into to earn a little more and have more autonomy as a business person is to go into pastry pastry cooking. So I did that for many years, made a lot of wedding cakes and fancy cookies. And I think of that training, like an engineering of desserts, how important that continues to be in thinking about bioengineering, thinking about materiality from the molecular scale through the structure to the aesthetic experience of the person who's encountering it. Bringing that into bioengineering gives me incredible advantages as a material scientist and as this other understanding process. And if I had just gone into bioengineering, I would've missed out on all of that. You know, transformation is always sometimes painful and always really hard to let go and gain things at the same time. But yeah, definitely to grow continuously through your life, I think you have to keep on shifting into uncomfortable languages and uncomfortable cultures to keep yourself growing. And again, just to open up more possibilities.
Ellen Oh: Well, I think that’s a great place for us to end. Thanks for the conversation.
From Stanford Arts, this is Art &.
Ellen Oh is our host. The show is produced and edited by me, Taylor Jones, with additional production support by Edi Dai.
Chase Everett is our sound designer and mixing engineer. Our theme song and music is composed by Juana Everett.
Series artwork is by Connie Ko.
Executive Producers are Anne Shulock and Ellen Oh.
Special thanks to Drew Endy, Phil Ross, Deborah Cullinan, Stanford Vice President for the Arts, and Stanford Live.
Art & is recorded at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University.
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