‘It is hubris to think that a fungal pandemic cannot happen to us’

Arturo Casadevall is a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has spent forty years investigating how fungi can both improve and destroy life as we know it. His new book, What When fungi win? maps out how we can overcome the increasing threat.

What first fascinated you about fungi?
When I was training to be an infectious disease researcher [in the 1980s]AIDS was the biggest problem we had. Patients did not die from HIV infections [which attack the immune system, leaving it vulnerable to other diseases], they died of ...