Carl Zimmer

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.

So these ideas were certainly there, you know, well over 2000 years ago.

Yeah, and this is another example of how we can kind of twist and deform history.

Louis Pasteur is a household name.

People know Louis Pasteur.

People know about pasteurization of milk.

Pasteur is associated with vaccines.

Pasteur did other things as well, and he was also perhaps the first aerobiologist, because he got interested in the fact that, say, in a factory where beet juice was being fermented to make alcohol, sometimes it would spoil.

And he was able to determine that there were some, what we know now are bacteria that were getting into the beet juice.

And so it was interrupting the usual fermentation from the yeast.

that in itself was a huge discovery.

And, but he was saying, well, wait, so why are there these, what we call bacteria in the spoiled juice?

And he thought, well, maybe they just float in the air.