Carl Zimmer

And so this was the basic idea that he put forward.

And then he made real headlines by saying like, well, maybe there's something that we can do to these germs while they're still in the air to protect our own health, in the same way you'd protect water so that you don't get cholera.

And he stumbled on ultraviolet light.

Basically, you could totally knock out influenza and a bunch of other pathogens just by hitting these droplets in the air with light.

And so the Welles, they were very difficult to work with.

They got thrown out of Harvard.

Fortunately, they got hired at Penn.

And they lasted there just long enough that they could run an experiment in some schools around Philadelphia.

And they put up ultraviolet lamps in the classrooms.

And those kids did not get hit by a huge measles outbreak that swept through Philadelphia not long afterwards.

Yes, they were incredibly difficult to work with.

And there's no biography of the Wellses.

So I had to go into archives and find letters and unpublished documents and memos.

And people would just say like, oh my goodness, these people are so unbearable.

They just were fighting all the time.

They were fighting with each other.

They were peculiar.

Particularly William was terrible with language.

And

People couldn't deal with them.