I don't think I understand this. And the fact the injected juice of boiled mushrooms made mushroom grow in his veins... It's beyond my sub-mediocre understanding.
This is a preparation stolen from heroin users. The idea is that you only want the water-soluble (i.e. dissolves in water) parts, and that the non-water-soluble parts are bad. So the cotton is meant to catch anything that isn't dissolved in the water. It's likely effective at catching large particulate.
> And the fact the injected juice of boiled mushrooms made mushroom grow in his veins... It's beyond my sub-mediocre understanding.
Mushrooms reproduce with spores, which are basically tiny tiny seeds. Too small to be caught by a cotton filter; solutions that have spores in them look like they're just kind of grey, you can't see the individual spores with a naked eye.
Spores are also some of the toughest things on the planet to kill. Surviving boiling wouldn't be crazy surprising to me. Anthrax spores (which is a bacteria, not a fungus) have been under the permafrost in the Arctic for who knows how long, and are infecting animals as the permafrost thaws.
Also, the article says he poured boiling water over them. Dumb, it's not going to uptake much of the psylocibin from the mushrooms on a single poor, but you know those gills on the bottom of the mushroom? The part with all the rows of really thin flesh? Those are covered in spores, and pouring water over them will definitely wash those spores into your solution.
Long story short, the guy was a moron. I think he was attempting to make injectible psylocibin, but that is a) generally unnecessary, and b) far more difficult than "lemme boil some mushrooms in water". At the very least, I would think you would want to isolate the psylocibin. Right now, he's injecting psylocibin, spores, and whatever bacteria he washed off the mushrooms with his boiling water bath. I'm not willing to bet my life that boiling water is enough to make it safe to inject. Maybe safe to drink in an emergency, but I would not risk sepsis for this.
I know nothing about biology either, but I'm guessing some spores survived the boiling and simply passed through the cotton.
Spores can survive atmospheric boiling temperatures of water. Often a pressure cooker is used to sanitize substrate (wheat, and many other things) to grow mushrooms on. This ensures the only spores that exist on your substrate is the ones that you want.
Substrate sterilization with a pressure cooker prevents bacterial growth and inactivates fungal virus that may ruin your harvest.