Carl Zimmer

She had to dig back because finding his book is not easy.

I will tell you that.

You can't buy it on Amazon.

It's a total flop.

Wow.

Yeah.

Eventually, she started reading his papers and getting deeper in it.

She was like, huh.

He was pretty smart.

He didn't say any of the things that people today are claiming he said.

There's a big disconnect here.

And that led her into joining a very small group of people who really were taking the idea of airborne infection seriously in the early 2000s.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

So Lydia was, again, not an infectious disease expert at first.

She was actually trained as a physicist.

She studied turbulence, like what you get in spinning galaxies or spinning water in a bathtub as it goes down the drain.

But, you know, she was very taken aback by the SARS outbreak in 2003, which did hit Canada where she was a student.

And it really got her getting interested in infectious diseases, emerging diseases, and, you know, asking herself, like, what tools can I bring from physics to this?