Carl Zimmer

Because they were in these constant fights, they had very few friends.

When you have a big consensus against you and you don't have very many friends not even to help you keep a job, it's not going to turn out well, unfortunately.

They did themselves no favors, but it is still...

really remarkable and sad just how much they figured out, which was then dismissed and forgotten.

Sure.

So Lindsay Marr belongs to this new generation of scientists in the 21st century who start to individually rediscover the Wellses.

Now, in Lindsay Marr's case, she was studying air pollution.

She's an atmospheric scientist.

And she's at Virginia Tech, and she and her husband are trying to juggle their jobs and raising a little kid.

And their son is constantly coming home from daycare because he's constantly getting sick, or there's a bunch of kids who are sick there and so on.

And that got Lindsay Moore actually really curious, like,

What's going on?

Because they were being careful about like washing objects and so on and doing their best to keep the kids healthy.

And she started like looking into ideas about transmission of diseases.

And she got very interested in the flu because in 2009, there was a new pandemic.

In other words, that you had this new strain of influenza surging throughout the world.

She said, well, let me look at what people are saying.

As soon as she started looking at it, she just said, well, people are saying things that, as a physicist, I know make no sense.

They're saying that droplets bigger than five microns just plummet to the ground.

In a way, that was part of a general rejection of airborne transmission.