Carl Zimmer

You did.

You did.

Thanks so much.

Great to be here.

Certainly the seed was planted in the pandemic.

You know, I was working as a journalist at the New York Times with a bunch of other reporters at the Times.

There were lots of other science writers also just trying to make sense of this totally new disease.

And we were talking with scientists who were also trying to make sense of the disease.

And so there was a lot of uncertainty, ambiguity, and things started to come into focus.

And I was really puzzled by how hard it was for consensus to emerge about how COVID spread.

And, you know, I did some reporting along with other people on this conflict about was this something that was, you know, spreading on surfaces or was it the word people were using was airborne?

And the World Health Organization said, no, it's not airborne.

It's not airborne.

until they said it was airborne.

And that just seemed like not quantum physics.

You know what I'm saying?

In the sense that it seemed like that would be the kind of thing that would get sorted out pretty quickly.

And I think that actually more spoke to my own unfamiliarity with the depth of this field.

And so I would talk to experts, like say Donald Milton, University of Maryland, I'd be like,

So help me understand this.