Carl Zimmer

How did this happen?

And he would say, well, you need to get to know some people like William Wells.

And I said, who?

Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought.

Yeah, there were just a whole bunch of people from a century ago or more that have been forgotten.

They've been lost to history, and yet they were real people.

visionaries, but they were also incredibly embattled.

And the question of how we messed up understanding why COVID was airborne turned out to have an answer that took me back thousands of years and really plunged me into this whole science that's known as aerobiology.

Well, it's certainly some of the earliest evidence we have that people were looking at the air and thinking about the air and thinking there's something about the air that matters to us.

Aristotle thought, well, there's clearly something important about the air.

Like life just seems to be revolve around breathing.

And he didn't know why.

And Hippocrates felt that there could be this stain on the air, this corruption of the air.

And this could explain why a lot of people in a particular area, young and old, might suddenly all get sick at the same time.

And so he put forward this miasma theory.

And, you know, there were also people who were like looking at farm fields and asking, well, why...

Are all my crops dead suddenly?

Like what happened?

And there were explanations that, you know, God sent something down to punish us because we've been bad.

And so, you know, or even that the air itself had a kind of miasma that affected plants as well as animals.