Science
A Fungi Pioneer’s Lifelong Work on Exhibit
On an early summer day in 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, putrid mushrooms repulsed fellow travelers riding a horse-drawn trolley car.
Even wrapped in paper, the stench of the aptly named stinkhorn mushrooms was overpowering, but the woman stifled a laugh upon overhearing two other passengers gripe about the swarm of flies around them. The smell didn’t bother her. All she cared about was getting the specimens home to study them, she would later write.
This was Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who, over the course of nearly four decades, conducted seminal research on the fungi of her state, Maryland.
Miss Banning characterized thousands of specimens that she found in Baltimore and the surrounding countryside, identifying 23 species new to science at the time.
A gifted artist, she collected these observations into a manuscript called “The Fungi of Maryland.” It consisted of 175 stunning watercolor plates, each an accurate yet intimate portrait of a given species, along with detailed scientific descriptions and anecdotes about collecting the mushrooms.
The manuscript was Miss Banning’s life’s work, and she yearned to see it published. But it ended up in a drawer at the New York State Museum in Albany, forgotten for almost a century.
A selection of her watercolors makes up the backbone of an exhibition at the museum that opened this month and runs until Jan. 4 of next year. The exhibition, called “Outcasts,” recognizes Miss Banning’s long-overlooked scientific legacy as well as the museum’s mycology collection, which is one of the most historically significant in the country, according to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, the museum’s mycology curator, who conceived the exhibition.
Miss Banning called fungi “vegetable outcasts.” Back then (and all the way until 1969) fungi were classified as a peculiar type of plant. Most botanists from the mid-19th century viewed their study as a research backwater.
Miss Banning herself was an outcast. “She wanted very much to be part of the scientific community,” said John Haines, who was the museum’s mycology curator until he retired in 2005 and who has extensively researched her history. But as a woman living in the 19th century, that path was largely closed to her.
Similar to contemporaries such as Beatrix Potter, who also sought to make her mark on the emerging field of mycology, “the sentiment was, ‘Well, you go home and make your pictures,’” Dr. Haines said.
One scientist did give her the time of day: Charles Horton Peck, who worked at the museum as New York’s first state botanist from 1868 to 1913. Mr. Peck, a pre-eminent figure in American mycology, dedicated most of his career to fungi, collecting more than 33,000 specimens in surveys across New York and describing more than 2,700 new species in his annual reports.
“A lot of the fungi that people recognize from New York or from the Northeast are ones that Peck described,” Dr. Kaishian said.
Miss Banning first wrote Mr. Peck in 1878, asking for feedback on her manuscript. Unlike other scientists she had tried to contact, he wrote back, and they corresponded for nearly 20 years. Her letters, some of which are exhibited, offer a window into their relationship.
“You are my only friend in the debatable land of fungi,” she wrote to him in 1879. She chronicled her collecting forays and scientific observations, and relayed her dreams for the manuscript. “I have a powerful will,” she wrote in 1889. “I have made up my mind to brave defeat sooner than not make an effort to have the plants of Maryland published.”
Miss Banning’s letters were often whimsical and passionate. None of Mr. Peck’s letters to her remain, but his tone in other letters suggested he was much more restrained. Nevertheless, he treated Miss Banning like a respected colleague — offering her scientific mentorship, publishing descriptions of species with her support and even naming species after her. Their scientific bond was undeniable.
“This is a love story, but not between the two people — they were both in love with fungi,” Mr. Haines said. A play he wrote about their relationship drawing from Miss Banning’s letters will be performed at the museum on April 4 at a gallery opening event for the exhibition.
Love triangles, though, are especially prone to turning sour. With no publishing prospects of her own in sight, Miss Banning sent her manuscript to Mr. Peck in 1890, hoping that he could publish it. “He would have had the resources to make it a permanent part of the mycological record,” Dr. Kaishian said. But he never did.
Although she expressed how difficult it was to part from the work and begged him to reassure her that he appreciated its contribution to the field, she did not receive such recognition. “It seems to me by her letters that she died without really understanding the legacy, the value of her work,” Dr. Kaishian said.
In one of her last letters to Mr. Peck in 1897, six years before she died, destitute and alone in a rooming house in Virginia, Miss Banning lamented the book’s loss. “I hardly know how I ever came to part with my illustrated book,” she wrote. “To tell you the truth, I long to see it and call it my own once more, but this could never be.”
“That just still brings tears to my eyes,” Dr. Haines said.
It was Dr. Haines who originally brought Miss Banning’s manuscript to light.
An eccentric curator showed it to him when he visited the museum for a job interview in 1969. He recalls being dazzled by the colors, which were superbly preserved by the fact that the pages had not been open to sunlight for decades.
He exhibited some of the paintings in 1981, and they were shown a few more times, including in Talbot County, Md., where Miss Banning was born. With the help of this spotlight, Miss Banning was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. But since the mid-1990s, in part because the pigments degrade quickly in the light, the pictures had been packed away.
Beyond Miss Banning’s work, “Outcasts” gives visitors a glimpse into the broader historical context of mycology. “Fungi are enormously critical organisms that, going back hundreds of millions of years, have shaped the very texture of the earth,” Dr. Kaishian said. “But their stories are still mysterious and often neglected.”
In addition to Miss Banning’s watercolors and letters, the exhibition includes a host of other artifacts and experiences. Visitors can explore one of Peck’s microscopes and mushroom specimens collected by Miss Banning as well as ones collected recently by Dr. Kaishian, or marvel at a set of strikingly realistic wax sculptures of New York fungi made for the museum in 1917 by an artist, Henri Marchand, and his son Paul.
Murals made by museum artists illustrate the biology of fungi, the role they play in the ecosystem and their evolutionary history. A rare fossil of Prototaxites, a 30-foot-tall fungus that lived during the Devonian period about 400 million years ago, points to just how significantly the Earth has changed over time.
Overall, Dr. Kaishian said she hoped that the exhibition demonstrated why natural history collections like this one deserve public support and preservation.
The 150-year-old specimens hidden in cabinets that visitors rarely see help scientists map the limits of different organisms, both geographically and genetically — and that makes it possible to document changes to biological diversity in the face of climate change, for example.
“Natural history collections are active repositories for contemporary research,” Dr. Kaishian said. “There needs to be a lot more science communication about what goes on here and why it matters.”
new video loaded: Pentagon Releases U.F.O. Files
By Jorge Mitssunaga
May 8, 2026
President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after a series of clashes over vaping, oversight of the abortion pill and a series of new drug application denials that rattled biotech companies, according to a person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Dr. Makary had a high profile for an F.D.A. commissioner, appearing frequently on television and podcasts to sell the work he was doing at the agency on improving the food supply, speeding up some drug approvals and trying to restore agency morale after thousands of staff members left.
He tried to walk the tightrope between the business-friendly Make America Great Again movement, pledging to get rid of regulations that slow down innovation and to attract more drug trials to the United States. He was an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again supporters, voicing the skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and authorizing natural food dyes.
Ultimately, Dr. Makary’s efforts were not enough to overcome the grievances of a growing band of enemies focused on selling tobacco, opposing abortion and seeing biotech therapies authorized.
Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss him was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision could still change, given Mr. Trump’s propensity to change his mind Dr. Makary has also proven persuasive with Mr. Trump in beating back previous efforts to oust him.
Leaving the White House Friday evening, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that Dr. Makary would be fired.
“I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The White House has pressured Dr. Makary for months to authorize flavored e-cigarettes, according to a person close to the conversations. The approvals were a top wish of major tobacco companies that have been top donors to Mr. Trump. In March, the F.D.A. issued a memo saying that it would only authorize e-cigarettes in flavors such as mint, tea and spices. The memo said the fruit and candy flavors would be unlikely to pass muster, given their appeal to young people.
Pressure continued, though, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. authorized blueberry and mango flavored e-cigarettes by Glas, a small company based in Los Angeles.
Abortion foes including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have continued to turn up the heat on Dr. Makary, reiterating their call for his firing on Thursday. The group’s leaders and others view Dr. Makary as dragging his feet on a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which they viewed as a way to highlight what they believe are dangers of the drug. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also opposes abortion rights, amplified criticism of Dr. Makary on social media as well.
The administration has been under pressure from conservatives to tighten regulations on the prescribing and dispensing of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court ruling that temporarily blocked abortion providers from prescribing the drug through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.
Biotech companies and their investors have also raised alarms with the White House about agency decisions to reject a series of treatments for rare diseases. The F.D.A. typically turns down about 20 percent of the applications it receives for drug approvals from companies.
Dr. Makary has been aggressive in defending the decisions, which he said came from career scientists who found the medications ineffective.
Dr. Makary also had to contend with a health secretary who seemed to view the F.D.A. as an avenue for getting his favored products authorized, exemplified by Mr. Kennedy’s social media post saying that the agency would end its “war on” stem cell treatments, peptides and raw milk. Mr. Kennedy pushed the F.D.A. to reverse a 2023 ban and allow the use of a number of peptides, unproven compounds purported to offer anti-aging or muscle-recovery benefits.
Before leading the F.D.A., Dr. Makary was a cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was also the author of several books about the health care system.
Some of Dr. Makary’s more popular moves included encouraging broader use of hormone replacement products for women and lifting the F.D.A.’s warnings on them. He helped speed some promising drugs to market, including a pancreatic cancer therapy and the pill form of the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
Some California residents were among the 147 passengers and staff aboard a luxury cruise ship stricken by a suspected outbreak of hantavirus that has left three people dead and several others severely ill, officials confirmed Thursday.
California public health officials say they are monitoring the situation after being notified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that some state residents were passengers on the MV Hondius. The precise status of those individuals, however, remains murky.
Hantavirus is a rare but deadly disease that attacks the lungs and is typically contracted by humans through inhalation of particles contaminated with the urine, feces or saliva of a wild rodent.
However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, confirmed Thursday that the Andes virus — a form of hantavirus that can spread from person to person — was involved in the outbreak.
Here’s what we know:
The MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, on Wednesday.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
As its name suggests, the Andes virus is typically found in South America. The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius was on a 46-day journey that traveled from Antarctica with stops in Argentina.
In the case of human-to-human transmission, a person would first be infected by a wild rodent’s contaminated particles and then pass the infection to someone else, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of the Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center.
“In previous outbreaks of Andes virus, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners and people providing medical care,” Ghebreyesus said. “That appears to be the case in the current situation.”
None of the remaining passengers or crew members on the ship are symptomatic, he said.
The ship was not permitted to allow passengers to disembark at its original destination, Cape Verde, and is sailing for Spain’s Canary Islands.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship. There’s a confined area,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic management, said at a briefing. “This is not the same situation we were in six years ago. It doesn’t spread the same way like coronaviruses do.”
California passengers on the cruise
On April 1, 114 guests boarded the cruise ship in Ushuaia, Argentina. Twenty-three days later, 30 passengers — including six people from the United States — disembarked on a stop in St. Helena, a remote island about 1,100 miles off the coast of Africa, according to the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Public health agencies in California, Georgia and Arizona were notified by the CDC that some of their residents were among the passengers on the cruise. It’s unclear whether these individuals disembarked on April 24, however.
The CDC is assisting local health authorities with monitoring California residents who were aboard the cruise, according to a statement by the California Department of Public Health on Friday.
As of Friday, one passenger has returned to their California residence and is in contact with local public health officials, and at least one other remains aboard the ship, according to the state agency.
“We understand that news of an unusual outbreak can be concerning,” said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health. “Unlike influenza and COVID-19, years of experience in South America have shown that this Andes hantavirus rarely spreads between people.”
Officials said the current public health protocol is to do daily symptom monitoring and reporting.
“As there are no known cases of Andes hantavirus infection from people without symptoms, and any spread has usually been limited to people with prolonged close contact with an ill person with this virus, the risk to the general public in California is extremely low,” the agency said in a statement.
In a statement earlier this week, the CDC also said that the risk to the American public “is extremely low” at this time.
“We urge all Americans aboard the ship to follow the guidance of health officials as we work to bring you home safely,” the agency said.
The others who exited the ship on April 24 were individuals from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, St. Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining passengers still aboard the ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands, California Department of Public Health said none were ill as of Friday.
How many people have been infected?
The number of lab-confirmed hantavirus cases has risen to five, according to the WHO. There are three additional suspected cases.
A timeline of reported cases of hantavirus aboard the cruise ship can be found here.
The WHO is monitoring reports of other people with symptoms “who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Tedros said.
The first passenger to have been infected, a Dutchman, became sick aboard the cruise ship on April 6 and died on April 11.
No samples were taken, because his symptoms were similar to other respiratory diseases. His widow left the ship with his body on April 24 during the scheduled stop at St. Helena.
“She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th of April and died the next day,” Tedros said.
Before boarding the cruise ship, the Dutch couple had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, “which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” Tedros said.
After leaving the ship, the woman was briefly aboard a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg bound for Amsterdam but was barred from the flight due to her medical condition, the airline said in a statement.
Dutch news outlets reported that a flight attendant on a KLM airplane — who briefly had contact with the widow — started feeling sick and had mild symptoms and was in isolation at a hospital in Amsterdam.
The flight attendant has since tested negative for the Andes virus, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician, wrote on his Substack blog, Inside Medicine, citing a text message sent to him by Tedros.
“It is still possible that the flight attendant contracted the Andes virus. However, given our understanding of the virus, this information means that the flight attendant’s symptoms are not caused by the Andes hantavirus, but by some other medical illness,” Faust wrote.
More cases may be reported, because the incubation period — the time it takes between exposure to the virus and the onset of illness — for the Andes strain of the hantavirus is up to six weeks.
What we know about hantavirus
There are roughly 50 identified species of hantavirus. The virus that’s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects the heart and the lungs, according to Frank.
There have been 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus disease reported in the U.S. since surveillance began in 1993, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
From 1980 to 2025, 99 California residents have been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection, according to the California Department of Public Health.
CDC officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease.
Still, the data suggest that contracting hantavirus is rare, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.
There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirius.
Intensive-care treatment may include intubation and oxygen therapy, fluid replacement and use of medications to lower blood pressure, according to the American Lung Assn.
The signs of hantavirus
Early symptoms of hantavirus are similar to the flu and include fatigue, fever and muscle aches, according to the CDC. Symptoms start to develop within one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent.
Half of those who contract the virus also experience headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Four to 10 days after the initial phase of the illness, another round of symptoms can develop, which include coughing, shortness of breath and possible tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid.
Even though contracting hantavirus in the U.S. continues to be a rare event, El-Hasan said, people should take these initial symptoms seriously and promptly seek medical care.
How to protect yourself
Hantavirus cases can occur year-round, but the peak seasons in the United States are the spring and summer, which coincide with the reproductive seasons for deer mice.
To lessen your risk of infection, keep wild rodents out of your home and other enclosed spaces by sealing any holes and placing snap traps.
If you find evidence of mice, wear personal protective equipment and disinfect the area. When you’re done, put everything, including cleaning materials, in a bag and toss it in your trash bin.
-
Indiana3 minutes ago6 Best Towns Near Indianapolis For Retirees
-
Iowa9 minutes agoGroundbreaking held for Iowa Valley Habitat for Humanity’s 16th Woman Build
-
Kansas15 minutes agoThis Chiefs-Bears trade would land Kansas City it’s long-term Travis Kelce replacement
-
Kentucky20 minutes agoBody found in Ohio River in northeast Kentucky ID’d as Columbus man
-
Louisiana27 minutes ago
Eight children killed in Louisiana mass shooting remembered at funeral
-
Maine33 minutes agoMaine inmate arrested after walking off Thomaston jobsite, corrections officers say
-
Maryland39 minutes agoMifepristone ruling could halt mailed abortion pills in ‘shield states’ like Maryland – WTOP News
-
Michigan45 minutes agoList of active weather alerts as storms move through Southeast Michigan
