He tried to warn them.
The HBO drama The Last of Us opened with a clip from a fictional TV interview with a scientist named Dr. Neuman, who told audiences in 1968 that “fungi seem harmless enough. [But] many species know otherwise. Because there are some fungi who seek not to kill, but to control. … Viruses can make us ill, but fungi can alter our very minds.”
Another scientist countered: “Fungal infections that cause major behavior changes are very real, just not so much for humans and other mammals.”
Back to Dr. Neuman: “True, fungi cannot survive if its host’s internal temperature is over 94 degrees. … But what if, for instance, the world were to get slightly warmer?”
On the show, this conversation sets the stage for a post-apocalyptic world in which a pandemic has turned most humans into “The Infected”—not exactly zombies, but rather violent fungi-infected humans who terrorize uninfected survivors.
—The fictional Dr. Neuman on The Last of Us
—The fictional Dr. Neuman on The Last of Us
The premise is rooted in science, but how plausible is it? We asked a scientist at LSA’s Herbarium, a collection of 1.7 million specimens of plants and fungi, to help us separate fact from science fiction.
Alison Harrington is the collection manager of fungi, lichens, and bryophytes at the Herbarium, a part of the research museums complex of LSA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The museums house some fantastically cool and creepy ant, wasp, and caterpillar specimens that were infected with “cordyceps” fungus, which caused the pandemic in The Last of Us.
The creators of The Last of Us video game series, which formed the basis of the television series, took inspiration from a sequence in the Planet Earth documentary. In it, an ophiocordyceps fungus infects an ant and forces it to climb a tree, hanging suspended above the forest floor. The fungus goes on to eat the ant’s body from the inside out and sends out spores to create more “zombie” ants.
—Alison Harrington of LSA’s Herbarium
Harrington, who has a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology, explains that “cordyceps” and relatives of cordyceps are fungi that can take over their host. “A lot of the species in this group infect insect hosts during parts of their lifecycle,” she says. “Once the insect is killed or mummified, the fungus erupts out of it with a fruiting body that produces spores. Some of the species cause really interesting behavioral changes in the insect host before that happens, causing their behavior to have a zombie-like quality that helps the fungus have a better chance of spreading the infection to other insect hosts.”
As for whether the fungus could infect humans, this is where the real Dr. Harrington disagrees with the fictional Dr. Neuman: She says it’s extremely unlikely. “Sure, there have been some studies suggesting that one factor that limits fungus’s ability to infect mammalian hosts is just the fact that mammals have higher body temperatures,” she says. “One idea carries that forward by suggesting that if the temperature is increasing in the ambient environment, maybe there’s a greater likelihood of some fungi tolerating higher temperatures generally and infecting mammals. I think that’s pretty far-fetched.
“The ability to infect a host doesn’t only depend on the characteristics of the fungus—the other big piece of this story is that human and more generally mammalian immune systems are really good at picking up on when a fungal infection is happening, ” she says. That’s partly because the surface of most fungus cells are covered in complex polysaccharide structures that produce a strong immune response in their host.
“The cases where we have exceptions are usually in groups of fungi that have life cycles that include single-celled (yeast-like) stages. When they’re in the single-celled form, they’re much better at evading the immune response in humans or other hosts,” she says. Additionally, people who have compromised immune systems can be very vulnerable to fungal infections that wouldn’t usually cause problems for humans.
Very few fungi of any variety spread from person to person—another reason that a Last of Us pandemic is highly unlikely, Harrington says. “There are definitely more immediate things to worry about,” she says, “than a cordyceps epidemic among humans.”
—Alison Harrington of LSA’s Herbarium
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| Release Date: | 11/12/2025 |
|---|---|
| Category: | Staff |
| Tags: | LSA; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Natural Sciences; LSA Magazine; Herbarium; Research Museums Center; Becky Sehenuk Waite; Katie Vloet |
