plenty of evidence, he remarked in this article, that fungi should be in their own kingdom, which he called “the third Kingdom.” Some years later, not eyebrows but fists might have been raised by this phrase, which is “Tredje rike” (Tird Reich) in Norwegian. Had Olsen still been alive, he probably would have informed his countrymen that fungi were not, definitely not, Nazis. Olsen’s belief that fungi should


inhabit their own kingdom passed more or less unnoticed. Tis is a pity, for he was doubtless the first mycologist to erect borders between fungi and plants. Never mind that he put bacteria in the same kingdom as fungi even though they lack a cell nucleus. Never mind, too, that he also put myxomycetes in this kingdom. After all, both bacteria and slime molds lack chlorophyll, so it didn’t seem appropriate to put them with plants. It would have seemed even less appropriate to put them with


animals, although fungi are now known to be more closely related to animals than to plants. Such was Olsen’s delight in all things


fungal that in 1907 he changed his name from Johan Olsen to Johan Sopp. His new surname means “mushroom” in Norwegian. As he’d been previously decorated as a Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olaf, he was now greeted at scientific meetings as well as on the street as Herr Sopp, or Sir Mushroom. He’d been called Gustav Sopp when he was a schoolboy, so he admitted that it was a quite easy segue to go from Olsen to Sopp. Another of Herr Sopp’s segues: in


the early years of the 20th century, he moved from a study of macrofungi to a study of microfungi. He became an authority on Penicillium and wrote a monograph on this genus in 1912. In fact, he had such an interest in Penicillium that, if he’d been culturing


certain species with the thought of using them as medicinals, he might have replaced Alexander Fleming as the instigator of penicillin. Likewise, he researched the role of microfungi in cheese fermentation as well as the role of yeasts in the brewing of beer. He also wrote a paper about parasitic fungal growths on spiderlings. Sir Mushroom died in 1930. He was a


veritable Renaissance mycologist about whom no less an eminence than French biologist Louis Pasteur wrote: “Hardly any other man has mastered all the disciplines of mycology.” To which I might add that hardly any other mycologist in these phylogenetically-obsessed times has hyphae that reach out in such a variety of directions as Sir Mushroom’s. Acknowledgment: I would like to thank


my Norwegian friend Ospen S. Ore for singing the praises of Herr Sopp to me and also providing me with information about Sopp’s life.


44 FUNGI Volume 14:4 Fall 2021


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