Jason Crawford

But nobody came up with any vaccines for any other diseases.

For almost 100 years.

My interpretation is essentially we needed the germ theory.

And we'll see that, in fact, one of the pioneers of the germ theory was the one who created the first engineered laboratory-created vaccines, the first vaccines after Jenner, almost 90 years later.

But without that epistemic base, you know, so how far did tinkering get us?

Well, it got us one vaccine.

We managed to stumble onto this without having a general theory of what causes disease or sort of knowing that science.

But that was as far as we could take it.

No other vaccines were created until we had a broader theory and scientific methods for experimenting with disease, which was maybe even more important.

In fact, not only can you make some progress with no theory, it turns out, but you can also make some progress on a wrong theory.

And a great example of this is the efforts of the early sanitation reformers.

So Max von Pettenkofer and Florence Nightingale were both key figures in the mid-1800s sanitation reform movement.

Pettenkofer advocated for cleaner water sources, like taking your water from clean sources upstream, making sure to dump the sewage downstream, maybe even filtering the water through sort of earlier primitive kind of filtration mechanisms.

And he got cities in, shoot, I'm blanking on those, Germany or Austria or whatever it was to, you know, to clean up their water.

Florence Nightingale did a lot of work, of course, in hospitals and medical settings, improving sanitation there.

Neither of them believed in the germ theory.

In fact, not only that, they sort of actively opposed it or ridiculed it.

Florence Nightingale wrote some scathing things about ridiculing germ theory.

Pettenkofer had this famous debate or disagreement with Robert Koch.

So Koch is one of the two key figures in establishing the germ theory.