Carl Zimmer

Spontaneous generation is a theory.

So aerobiology, among many, many other things, destroyed this idea that life could spontaneously burst into existence.

Not quite.

So he had these ideas about what it would take to actually show that some particular pathogen, a germ, actually caused a disease.

And that involved isolating it from patients, culturing it outside of them, and then actually

experimentally infecting an animal and showing the symptoms again.

And he did that with things like anthrax and tuberculosis.

He nailed that.

But then when it came to cholera, there was a huge outbreak in Egypt, and people were still battling over what caused cholera.

Was it miasma?

Was it corruption in the air?

Or was it, as Koch and others believe, some type of bacteria?

And he found a particular kind of bacteria in the stool of people who were dying or dead of cholera.

and he could culture it, and he consistently found it, and, you know, when he injected animals with it, it just didn't quite work.

Yeah, they really are.

And although, you know, by the time they had died, you know, around 1960,

They were pretty much forgotten already.

And yet, in the 1930s, the two of them, first at Harvard and then at the University of Pennsylvania, did some incredible work to actually challenge

this idea that that airborne infection was not anything real or at least nothing really to worry about because once the miasmas have been cleared away people who embrace the germ theory of disease said look we've got cholera and water we've got yellow fever and mosquitoes we've got syphilis and sex we have all these ways that germs can get from one person to the next

We don't need to worry about the air anymore.