Chapter 1: How did the pandemic inspire the book 'Air-Borne'?
Well, hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truce. And I am just thrilled today to welcome Carl Zimmer, who is one of the great science journalists of our times. He's written 14 books. He writes for the New York Times and many other venues of great science journalism.
Chapter 2: What is the historical significance of airborne diseases?
And he has a new book, which I absolutely love, called Airborne. And you can see, I have all these rabbit, Page is tagged and there's lots to talk about here because this book is the book of air. I mean, it is. I mean, we're talking about everything that you ever wanted to know about air and where we need to go, how we missed the boat and COVID and everything else. So welcome, Carl.
Thanks so much.
Chapter 3: Who were William and Mildred Wells and what was their contribution?
Great to be here.
Well, you know, the book starts off with the Skagit Valley choir that you and your wife, Grace, attended a few years later, I guess, in Washington, which is really interesting. And I guess my first question is, it had the look that this whole book was inspired by the pandemic. Is that right?
Certainly the seed was planted in the pandemic. You know, I was working as a journalist at the New York Times with a bunch of other reporters at the Times. There were lots of other science writers also just trying to make sense of this totally new disease. And we were talking with scientists who were also trying to make sense of the disease.
And so there was a lot of uncertainty, ambiguity, and things started to come into focus.
Chapter 4: What role did Louis Pasteur play in aerobiology?
And I was really puzzled by how hard it was for consensus to emerge about how COVID spread. And, you know, I did some reporting along with other people on this conflict about was this something that was, you know, spreading on surfaces or was it the word people were using was airborne? And the World Health Organization said, no, it's not airborne. It's not airborne.
until they said it was airborne.
Chapter 5: How did the Skagit Valley Chorale outbreak illustrate airborne transmission?
And that just seemed like not quantum physics. You know what I'm saying? In the sense that it seemed like that would be the kind of thing that would get sorted out pretty quickly. And I think that actually more spoke to my own unfamiliarity with the depth of this field. And so I would talk to experts, like say Donald Milton, University of Maryland, I'd be like,
Chapter 6: What were the challenges faced by scientists advocating for airborne transmission recognition?
So help me understand this. How did this happen? And he would say, well, you need to get to know some people like William Wells. And I said, who? Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, there were just a whole bunch of people from a century ago or more that have been forgotten. They've been lost to history, and yet they were real people. visionaries, but they were also incredibly embattled.
And the question of how we messed up understanding why COVID was airborne turned out to have an answer that took me back thousands of years and really plunged me into this whole science that's known as aerobiology.
Yeah, no, it's striking.
Chapter 7: How does air pollution impact health and disease transmission?
And we're going to get, of course, into the COVID story and how it got completely botched as to how it was being transmitted. But, of course, as you go through history, you see a lot of the same themes of confusion and naysayers and you know, just extraordinary denialism of whatever. But as you said, this goes back thousands of years.
And perhaps the miasma, the moral stain in the air, that was kind of started, this is, of course, long before there was a thing called germ theory. Is that really kind of where the air thing got going?
Well, it's certainly some of the earliest evidence we have that people were looking at the air and thinking about the air and thinking there's something about the air that matters to us. Aristotle thought, well, there's clearly something important about the air. Like life just seems to be revolve around breathing. And he didn't know why.
Chapter 8: What future steps can be taken to improve indoor air quality?
And Hippocrates felt that there could be this stain on the air, this corruption of the air. And this could explain why a lot of people in a particular area, young and old, might suddenly all get sick at the same time. And so he put forward this miasma theory. And, you know, there were also people who were like looking at farm fields and asking, well, why... Are all my crops dead suddenly?
Like what happened? And there were explanations that, you know, God sent something down to punish us because we've been bad. And so, you know, or even that the air itself had a kind of miasma that affected plants as well as animals. So these ideas were certainly there, you know, well over 2000 years ago.
Yeah, now, as we go fast forward, we're going to get, of course, into the critical work of William and Mildred Wells, who I'd never heard of before until I read your book, I have to say. Talk about seven, eight decades filed into oblivion. But before we get to them, because their work was seminal, you really get into the contributions of Louis Pasteur,
Maybe you could, you know, give us a skinny on what his contributions were because I was unaware of his work and the glaciers, murder glass and figuring out what was going on in the air. So what did he really do to help this field?
Yeah, and this is another example of how we can kind of twist and deform history. Louis Pasteur is a household name. People know Louis Pasteur. People know about pasteurization of milk. Pasteur is associated with vaccines.
Pasteur did other things as well, and he was also perhaps the first aerobiologist, because he got interested in the fact that, say, in a factory where beet juice was being fermented to make alcohol, sometimes it would spoil. And he was able to determine that there were some, what we know now are bacteria that were getting into the beet juice.
And so it was interrupting the usual fermentation from the yeast. that in itself was a huge discovery. And, but he was saying, well, wait, so why are there these, what we call bacteria in the spoiled juice? And he thought, well, maybe they just float in the air. Yeah.
And this was really a controversial idea in say 1860, because, uh, you know, even then there were many people who were, were persuaded that, um, When you found microorganisms in something, they were the result of spontaneous generation. In other words, the beet juice spontaneously produced this life. This was standard view of how life worked. And Pasteur was like, I'm not sure I buy this.
And this basically led him into an incredible series of studies around Paris. He would have a flask and he'd have a long neck on it. And the flask was full of sterile broth and he would just take it places and he would just hold it there for a while. And eventually bacteria would fall down that long neck and they would settle in the broth and they would multiply in there. They would turn cloudy.
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