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- [00:01]
Host 1
Quick note before we begin this week.
- [00:02]
Host 2
Search engine is looking for some more.
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Host 1
Help on the production front. If you're an incredible researcher, a frightfully organized type, a person who alphabetizes their.
- [00:12]
Host 2
Socks, and if you have experience with.
- [00:14]
Host 1
Audio production, we have all the details at the link in our show Notes.
- [00:18]
Host 2
Thanks. This episode is brought to you in part by policygenius. Protect your family by securing their future with life insurance from policygenius policygenius makes finding and buying life insurance simple and ensures your loved ones have a financial financial safety net they can use to cover debts and routine expenses, or even invest that money to earn interest over time. With policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. Did you know that 40% of people wish they got life insurance at a younger age? PolicyGenius combines digital tools with the expertise of real licensed agents. You can compare quotes from America's top insurers side by side for free, with no hidden fees. Their licensed support team helps you get what you need fast so you can get on with your life. They answer questions, handle paperwork and advocate.
- [01:12]
Host 1
For you throughout the process.
- [01:14]
Host 2
Secure your families tomorrow so you have peace of mind. Today, head to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com this episode is brought to you in part by Discover. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year.
- [01:45]
Host 1
Seriously. All of it.
- [01:47]
Host 2
And they trust you to make smart choices. After all, you listen to this show see terms@discover.com.
- [02:25]
Host 1
I've been thinking lately a lot about germs. I'll tell you why Everyone where I live has been getting hideously sick. It's that time of year. There's been a flu thing going around. There's been norovirus. Lots of my friends describing in overly vivid terms what it was like for them when vomit came out of their nose. Lovely stuff. And the season has reminded me of how sickness itself is this mystery that we rarely completely solve. Your body gets taken out for a day, a week, and you wonder, your arms encircling the toilet like a teenager at a high school dance. Was it your sniffling coworker? Was it when you Touched the pole on the subway? Was your body just somehow run down from work? These spells feel to me in an essential way, like mysteries. I was talking about all this recently with a science journalist who has studied how we know what we know about sickness. And the conversation really surprised me. In this moment we're in with measles returning, bird flu on the horizon. My guest had a story about how scientists try to arrive at the right consensus about illnesses and how they actually sometimes fail to reach the right consensus. And this story boggled me. I found myself repeating it to everyone I run into.
- [03:42]
Host 2
Can you introduce yourself?
- [03:44]
Carl Zimmer
My name's Carl Zimmer.
- [03:45]
Interviewer
And you're the author of a new book called Airborne, which it's about more than just this, but in the context of this episode, part of what it is about is germs that travel in the air and make people sick.
- [03:57]
Carl Zimmer
That's right, yes. And that was a seed of the books, certainly. Is that during the COVID pandemic, I was wondering, like, how is this virus getting from one person to another?
- [04:08]
Interviewer
And were you, like, during the pandemic, pandemic, how much were you finding yourself, like, thinking in a sort of reporter writer mind versus, like, a person screaming in panic like everybody else?
- [04:24]
Carl Zimmer
I had the misfortune, I suppose you could say, having written a lot in previous years about emerging diseases, writing for the New York Times, writing in books. And so, you know, I was anticipating that there would be some virus or bacterium that would be spilling over from some animal host, maybe a bat, and that it would sweep across the world. And I was just wondering if we'd be ready for it. And so in January 2020, you know, there was this news coming out of Wuhan, and they said, it's a coronavirus. And I thought, well, that's not good, because we know from SARS in 2003 that coronaviruses can be pretty nast. And then when I heard that Wuhan, a city bigger than New York, had shut down because of this coronavirus, I said, oh, boy, I think it might be coming. And my colleagues were talking to various experts, and they were like, yeah, we think it's a pandemic. So by February, I was in full, like, let's get ready for pandemic mode. And all of my friends thought I was crazy. I wish I had not been right on that score. But I was.
- [05:40]
Host 1
For Carl Zimmer, the story of COVID wasn't just about a new disease and how quickly it spread. It was also a story about how ideas spread or how sometimes they Don't. One of the most remarkable facts about COVID something that took quite a while to understand was that it was airborne, meaning you could get sick not just from someone who coughed or sneezed right next to you, but from the tiny droplets of the virus carried in the air. The air in your subway car, at your office, in your grocery store. It took people a while to understand this. The early advice to wash your groceries, but not to worry about masks. Part of the reason that advice was wrong was because the idea that this disease could have been circulating in the air itself was just not something most people believed, not until well into the pandemic. But to Carl's surprise, this concept of airborne transmission had actually been known to scientists as early as the 1930s. The story of that idea's discovery and the reasons it never really caught on. It's a very unique kind of tragedy that centers on what happened to the couple who figured this all out.
- [06:50]
Carl Zimmer
There were just a real visionary couple, husband and wife team in the 1930s that led the charge, named William and Mildred Wells.
- [07:00]
Interviewer
And what did it mean for them to lead the charge? Like, what was their theory? How did they come up with it, and where were they trying to make their arguments?
- [07:09]
Carl Zimmer
So William and Mildred Wells were really kind of scientific outsiders. Mildred had been trained as a doctor at the University of Texas. She got her degree in 1915. So that was pretty rare for a woman in that period to be a doctor. She goes to Washington, D.C. and she starts working in a microbiology lab, a public health laboratory. And she meets this young sanitary engineer named William Firth Wells. Wells has trained at MIT Studying things like typhoid in the water. And now he is studying not just polluted water, but he's studying how the oysters can pick up the bacteria that cause typhoid, because people were dying in droves eating raw oysters that were contaminated with bacteria.
- [07:55]
Interviewer
Oh, wow.
- [07:56]
Carl Zimmer
He goes off to fight in World War I. He actually has the job of delivering clean water to the soldiers. So he's saving lives with the germ theory of disease. And so he's disinfecting water and delivering it to troops and so on. But they're dying in droves, not of typhoid, but of influenza. And here you have a respiratory disease, and no one's really sure how it's spreading. So some people are putting on masks. Some people are saying that it's spread by those big droplets that smack people in the face. Other people are saying, well, that doesn't seem to make sense, because it seemed to be spreading even without that. So there's a huge amount of confusion. Kills 50, 100 million people. This is the Spanish flu, 1918 Spanish flu, yeah.
- [08:41]
Interviewer
And they don't know how it's spreading?
- [08:43]
Carl Zimmer
No, they know very little. I mean, going into this, the scientific understanding of influenza was shockingly small at this point. Just remember, they didn't even know what caused it. A lot of people thought it was caused by some kind of bacteria. And in fact, someone invented a vaccine for that bacteria and started giving it out in some American cities. Except it's not bacteria, it's a particular virus, but no one had found it yet.
- [09:07]
Host 2
Right.
- [09:08]
Carl Zimmer
So if you don't even know the germ that's causing it, like, it's going to be kind of tricky to figure out how it's spreading. So the level of confusion and ignorance was enormous, and people paid the price.
- [09:23]
Host 2
The 1918 pandemic was much deadlier than even the highest estimates for Covid. Something like 3 to 5% of the world population just gone. As Carl says, one of the reasons that that pandemic lasted as long as it did and killed so many people was that, unlike with COVID we never developed a 100% correct understanding for how it was spreading while it was still ongoing. So some of what we did to prevent the spread worked, some didn't. Really, what ultimately happened was that after a lot of death, that flu finally transformed into a less deadly seasonal flu. Back then, the advice Americans were given to stay healthy in flu season sounded like the advice I grew up with. COVID your mouth when you sneeze, don't share food or water. Basically, watch out for germs, but don't worry about the air itself.
- [10:11]
Carl Zimmer
This was a mindset that established itself at a very particular time in history. You know, in the early 1900s, and it hasn't changed all that much since. Even though by the 1930s, William and Mildred Wells and other people were amassing evidence that actually these germs can just gradually fill a room like smoke.
- [10:40]
Host 1
The story of how William and his wife Mildred figured all this out, it's an unlikely one. They were working in an era where science had already knocked down this previous consensus view for how disease spread in the air, the miasma theory. The miasma theory held that diseases are caused not by germs, but by foul, corrupted air. Not true. But because the miasma theory was discredited, the idea that germs could spread through the air at all, that idea was thrown out with it by most people. But when Carl Zimmer was Trying to understand why it took us so long to realize that Covid and other diseases could be airborne. He would catch glancing references to these long dead married scientists.
- [11:24]
Carl Zimmer
People were saying, like, you need to learn about William and Mildred Wells. Like, if you really want to start to understand this weird history behind the COVID pandemic, start with genuine O. The Wells. I had not heard of them before, I confess. You know, there's no biography of them. They have some papers that are floating around in old archives, old library shelves, but, you know, there just wasn't that much. So I just, you know, I've done my best with letters and unpublished documents, you know, things that are tucked away in archives to try to reconstruct what happened. And actually, like, William Wells shouldn't have been the pioneer of airborne infection. He was the wrong person because he had been trained at MIT by people who were passionate about taking down miasmas and who are passionate about keeping people safe by giving them clean water and clean food. He should have just kept doing that. But for some reason, when he shows up at Harvard desperate for a job at this point in 1930, somehow he starts to think about the air. It might be because some people at the Harvard School of Public Health were studying other aspects of the health of the air, like fumes in factories and so on. They were studying those kind of health issues. And that may have gotten him thinking, like, maybe we've been too hasty to dismiss the air. And one insight he had, I think, comes from oysters. So oysters are sitting in the water and they're filtering that water, and they filter a colossal amount of water every day. And that's how they eat. And so even if there's not that much, you know, deadly bacteria in the water, the oyster will get it.
- [13:07]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [13:08]
Carl Zimmer
And it'll trap it in its tissues. And the fact is that we breathe a couple thousand times a day, so we're kind of like oysters. Even if there aren't a whole lot of microbes floating in the air, we're going to probably get to them, you know.
- [13:23]
Interviewer
And so the Welles's, like, how were they amassing evidence? Like, what were they doing? What are their experiments?
- [13:31]
Carl Zimmer
One of the most basic things that they had to do was to show that there were germs in the air. And so what he decided is, like, if we're really going to understand whether air is dangerous or not, we need a better tool. We need a better way to measure what's in the air. So William Wells created this ingenious device, an air Centrifuge. And basically it was this shaft with a glass cylinder inside of it. And they would spin, and there were, like, fan blades inside on the top of the shaft, which is inside a box. And so it would basically be pulling air up through that glass cylinder. And as the cylinder's spinning, the air would rotate, and any bacteria or viruses or droplets, what have you, would get flung against the walls. And so then you take out the glass cylinder and you just put it in an incubator, nice and warm for a few days and see what grew. And once you did, lo and behold, hey, there's a lot of stuff floating in the air, particularly indoors.
- [14:43]
Host 2
And just to make sure I understand.
- [14:44]
Interviewer
It'S like the orthodoxy that he was diverging from and the thing that he was arriving at, the reason that the consensus view was against the idea of airborne transmission was because it looked too much like the miasma theory. And since the miasma theory, which is just like sort of bad air, makes people sick, since that had been thrown out, for him to show up and say, well, I do think something in the air makes people sick, it made him look kind of like, to some people, a crackpot, like somebody who was picking up something that scientists had discarded.
- [15:15]
Carl Zimmer
That's absolutely right. We know this because William and Mildred, when they started to introduce their theory in papers in the 1930s, they would say, essentially, okay, we know this might sound a little crazy. We know that it might sound like we're talking about miasmas. We know that and we're not. We're talking about something else. And the thing is that people needed to understand that the physics of our breathing and how the atmosphere works could permit germs to float in the air and become essentially airborne.
- [15:52]
Host 2
What the wells had figured out was that when you sneeze, yes, there are big droplets that might fall onto a nearby surface, but smaller droplets might be small enough to catch the air and float and circulate and to spread germs that way. And the wells were actually able to convince people to take this idea seriously because they were willing to conduct their tests publicly in the real world. In the 1930s, they proved that tuberculosis, streptococcal infections, and influenza, some of the deadliest diseases of the 20th century, could be transmitted through what they called droplet nuclei.
- [16:27]
Host 1
This was a huge discovery.
- [16:29]
Host 2
The wells were called geniuses.
- [16:31]
Interviewer
They were profiled in Time magazine.
- [16:33]
Host 2
The New York Times wrote that hopefully the wells research would, quote, shatter the, quote, comforting doctrine that disease only spread via the kind of large droplets emitted by a nearby sneezer. That's 1934. And the wells didn't just discover that the air could become contaminated. They actually started devising ways to make indoor air safer to breathe.
- [16:55]
Carl Zimmer
William Wells created this device called the infection machine. It was a big bell jar. You could put some mice in there. You could put a rabbit in there if you wanted. And then it was connected up to a long tube. And at the end of that tube, you could generate kind of a deadly mist of tiny droplets that had some germs in it. And so if he put enough influenza virus into that and it made its way down to the bell jar, and the animals breathed it in, they got the flu. And if you put in more of those viruses, they breathed in and they died of the flu. And that was true for other diseases. Now, if you clipped on an ultraviolet light so that as the air passed along, it got zapped by ultraviolet light, the animals didn't get sick. And that's because the viruses or bacteria were disabled by the ultraviolet light. And that result has completely held up. In 1940, for example, William and Mildred Wells installed ultraviolet lamps in a couple schools in Philadelphia just to show, you know, we can actually, like, protect people with this. You have to bear in mind these are not UV lamps that are just pointing down at kids and blinding them or giving them skin cancer. They were pointed up towards the ceiling. But as the air is circulating upwards, those droplets would get knocked out by the uv.
- [18:23]
Host 2
This sounded to me like borderline science fiction. A UV light machine killing disease particles as they float through the air. But the much more surprising thing is what happened when those experimental UV lights were actually put to the test.
- [18:38]
Carl Zimmer
A huge epidemic of measles hit. And you have to remember, this is a time before there were vaccines. So when a measles epidemic came, it was devastating. And the kids in this school were protected. The rates of measles were far lower than for kids in other parts of Philadelphia. So they showed that it worked and that it worked on people.
- [19:04]
Host 2
It's just very strange to me because.
- [19:07]
Interviewer
It goes against my understanding not of how diseases circulate, but how ideas circulate, which is that if someone has a new idea and they prove it and they prove it's useful, that idea remains durable in the public consciousness, and that person remains, like, remembered in the public imagination. Like, you would think that someone who did something like this school experiment in Philadelphia, they would. I don't know their names and their ideas would be up there, like, why doesn't this stick?
- [19:38]
Carl Zimmer
Science is a human activity. And so people have to work together. And so there's inevitably a certain kind of political dimension to science, like with everything else.
- [19:47]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [19:47]
Carl Zimmer
And so when you read through these archives and there are these reports on the Wells and what they're up to, people will be quite frank. They'll be like, the Wells are just incredibly difficult to work with. They're their own worst enemies. They make things difficult even for their closest friends.
- [20:05]
Interviewer
And in which way, like, what kind of difficult were these two?
- [20:08]
Carl Zimmer
I think because they were outsiders, they were always very paranoid that people were going to steal their ideas. The word paranoiac is actually used by a scientist who knew them both very well. People are very honest about it. They're peculiar. They're paranoiac. And, you know, they didn't have advanced degrees. And even after they had been making all these discoveries, Harvard fired them. They just said, get out of here. And part of the reason was because the scientists who had lent them the ultraviolet lamps didn't think they'd have any chance of working. And when they did start working, he said, okay, well, I want to have my name on this patent. I want to be a co author on this paper, and you're going to do all your research in my lab under my direction from now on. And they, of course, rather than trying to find a political solution, just started screaming. And that's how they were. You know, they had a lot of other issues in their life. I suspect that William Welles, I don't know. I think a psychologist could have a field day trying to diagnose what William Wells has put it. That way he would go on long, long monologues, hours, to anybody who would listen, and in a way that undermined his case because, like, he had a compelling case to make, but he delivered it in this just unbearable way that people just didn't want to listen to him.
- [21:25]
Interviewer
After a while, it makes me wonder if, like, I think one of the reasons sometimes as a society we miss certain true things is because most of us are intensely social people and have a desire to fit in with the people around us. And that means, you know, for the most part, believing most of the things that people around us believe. And it's like, doesn't it seem possible that their superpower, which was to see things differently and their sort of Achilles heel, which was to be very, very difficult people, like, those things were maybe bound together.
- [22:00]
Carl Zimmer
Sure. I mean, just inventing the air centrifuge was a kind of a crazy thing to try, you know, the reason that no one had invented it before, because no one thought it would work. And there was literally someone at Harvard who was watching William Wells try to build this thing. He was inspired by the centrifuges people used to separate cream from milk. And so here he is saying, oh, we could do that with air. And so this colleague at Harvard's like, I bet you that's not gonna work. That's totally not gonna work. And he lost the bet. So you did need someone like Wells maybe to have that originality of thought, to try to build something and to have an idea and to pursue it. But there is that flip side that maybe you are so single minded that you are actually paranoid that you actually, you know, instead of having conversations with people, you just try to dominate them with your monologues and so on. This is not an uncommon figure in the world of science, this kind of personality type.
- [23:00]
Host 2
Part of what makes this story so.
- [23:02]
Host 1
Surprising to Carl Zimmer is that science, frankly, is a place that more than other fields, does tolerate brilliant, difficult people. If ever there was a place to.
- [23:14]
Host 2
Put up with some jerkiness, it'd be in the fields where someone's contributions can save lives.
- [23:20]
Host 1
The world is not short on heroes of science whose labs you would never have wanted to work in. The inventor of the germ theory of disease, for instance, a gigantic asshole.
- [23:30]
Carl Zimmer
You know, Louis Pasteur is this iconic figure that we all know about. And, you know, the fact is that in some ways he was a pretty awful person. He would steal people's ideas, he would try to get his enemies driven out of the field. And in some ways he was just a really bad person. But he was also very, you know, savvy in understanding the politics of science in Paris at the time and ended up being, you know, a sort of a secular saint to France when he died. So, yeah, I mean, maybe other people get forgotten for other reasons, but for the Welles, you know, it was partly because they weren't very good at building big alliances. I think that we all get taught science and the history of science in a certain version where everything seems simple and where ideas just fall into place and everyone says, aha, that's great, now we can move on.
- [24:29]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [24:30]
Carl Zimmer
And sometimes that happens, but a lot of times it doesn't. And I think the story of William and Mildred Wells really demonstrates that can actually be the opposite of what happens. You have William and Mildred Wells in the 1930s making all of these discoveries, which in hindsight seem incredibly important and relevant, and we kind of wish we all knew about with the COVID pandemic. And, you Know, within a couple decades, they were gone. They were forgotten. And their ideas were either forgotten or misunderstood. And so their legacy was lost.
- [25:09]
Host 2
In the decades that followed, the Welles ideas were far outside the mainstream of scientific consensus, picked up only occasionally by stray researchers trying to solve very specific problems. For instance, an American tuberculosis researcher trying to stop an outbreak in Boston's homeless shelters in the 1980s tracks down one of the Wells old lab assistants. Or a Chinese scientist trying to make sense of the SARS outbreak in the 2000s has to convince an American university to send him photocopied pages of a totally forgotten Wells book that had been published in the 1950s. And that was the way that the Welles ideas continued to flicker through decades of obscurity. Individual scientists pulling on individual threads in the research. Slowly, over decades, those threads start to come together. By the 2010s, a small community of Wells disciples has coalesced around this theory of airborne transmission.
- [26:03]
Carl Zimmer
And so there are people like that who slowly were kind of forming this small community up until the COVID pandemic. So that when the COVID pandemic comes, they're all saying, hey folks, this might be airborne. And yet even then, people in positions of authority are saying, no, it's not. World Health Organization actually said Covid is not airborne.
- [26:27]
Interviewer
So these people were more successful than the Welles's, but they still struggled to.
- [26:33]
Host 1
Get this idea across.
- [26:36]
Carl Zimmer
Oh yes, they were definitely struggling for quite a long time. And I think there was a very high bar too for people to be convinced. Because if you say this disease is airborne, then the whole system that you have in place to protect people from getting sick really has to change. And people at the World Health Organization, when these airborne advocates came to them, they said, look like we're not going to be going and telling all these countries with limited healthcare budgets that suddenly they're gonna have to like, you know, disinfect the air all over the place in these facilities and then, you know, in the community as well. We're not gonna do that unless we've got like ironclad evidence. And so then when there was this evidence that could be put forward, they'd say, well, that's not good enough. So you see how the bar gets set very high because people are like, it's a big deal if we utter the word airborne. We'd rather not, you know, and if you'd rather not do something, then maybe that's or tips the balance of how you're going to decide whether to do that thing or not.
- [27:46]
Host 1
The World Health Organization would finally concede that Covid was airborne in April 2021, over a year after the pandemic had begun. Most of what we depend on the pipes that bring us our water, the bridges we drive our cars across, the airplanes that mostly stay aloft. The closer you look at any of it, the more ramshackle and rickety it all feels.
- [28:08]
Interviewer
This really works, and it's a little.
- [28:12]
Host 1
Unclear to me even now if we're supposed to hear the story of the Wells discovery lost, then found again as.
- [28:19]
Host 2
A tragedy or as an example of.
- [28:21]
Host 1
The system working, just working at a human pace under human constraints.
- [28:27]
Carl Zimmer
I think if people understood how science actually works, you know, it is messy, it is contentious, people make mistakes and so on. And yet we do learn things. And just in terms of public health, we are so much healthier now than 150 years ago, thanks to our knowledge about the germ theory of disease, thanks to vaccines, thanks to antibiotics and all sorts of other things. It just takes a while to get there.
- [28:58]
Host 2
We're going to take another short break. When we come back, I ask Carl Zimmer whether the same warning signs that were sounding for him in the months leading up to the COVID 19 pandemic, whether he hears them now as we look to the next possible pandemic on the horizon bird flu. This episode is brought to you in.
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Carl Zimmer
This.
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Carl Zimmer
I think it feels like you can.
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- [32:20]
Host 2
Welcome back to the show. Right now, the worrying disease on the.
- [32:26]
Interviewer
Horizon is bird flu.
- [32:28]
Host 2
Do we know if bird flu is airborne?
- [32:30]
Carl Zimmer
Bird flu refers to these influenza viruses that circulate mainly among birds. And when they're among birds, they're not like our flu in the sense that these viruses multiply in their guts, they get shed out with droppings and then they spread that way. Now there have been scientists who have gone to these, you know, live animal markets in, like, Vietnam, for example, and taken air samplers, and they find plenty of bird flu in the air. And what seems to be happening there is that the virus is shed in the droppings and gets on the ground, kind of mixes with the dust and then that gets kicked up by the circulating air, you know, and if you breathe that in, that could not be good. Now people can also sort of get sick by sort of inhaling the stuff coming off of birds when they're handling the birds, too. Yeah, we're really worried right now about something called H5N1 bird flu, which first came to light in China in 1996. But what's really concerning now is that since last year, it is, it's in the United States, it's in birds, but it's also running rampant in cows and cats. And that's not good because that affords an opportunity for this virus to get more adapted to moving between mammals and also like people who own cats or people who work at dairies, like, they are potentially exposed to these viruses. And if it gets inside someone's body, there's an opportunity for more evolution. And the fear that's a healthy fear is that essentially the bird flu could evolve to become a human flu. And part of that may be, how do you become airborne? How do you go from being a gut bug to being something that gets exhaled in little droplets and other people breathe it in? And now you have the next big pandemic. That's what people are worried about, and we're not going in the right direction. More and more herds are being found in the United States with bird flu. It seems to have spilled over at least three times independently, from birds to cows. Yeah, we're in a bad situation.
- [35:01]
Host 2
Jesus.
- [35:03]
Interviewer
Just for you personally, what does your pandemic prep kit at home look like? Just wondering.
- [35:14]
Carl Zimmer
Well, you know, I do take a carbon dioxide monitor around with me. Do you know these things?
- [35:19]
Interviewer
No.
- [35:20]
Carl Zimmer
There's little handheld things that have a big number on them that basically shows you the parts per million of carbon dioxide. And that's a quick and dirty way to get an idea of the potential risk from airborne disease. Covid other stuff.
- [35:34]
Interviewer
So you can see how much of other people's breath is in the air.
- [35:38]
Carl Zimmer
Exactly. So if you're outside, you know, your carbon dioxide meter would probably register, I don't know, 450 parts per million, you know, somewhere around there. And if you go inside and you're just in a room by yourself and you have the windows closed and you're just sitting there working at your computer or something, you're exhaling carbon dioxide and droplets and all sorts of other stuff. And the carbon dioxide level in the room is going to go up the more you breathe. And if you have two people in that unventilated room, it's going to go up at a faster rate. And if you have, say, you know, 30 people in a plane where they haven't turned on their air filters yet, it's going to shoot up. So I'll take it on planes. And it goes up to like 2000 easy once they close those doors. So that's why I choose to wear an N95 on planes, certainly before they've switched on their filters. I mean, so I would say that those are some of the core parts of my sort of pandemic kit. But actually, that's not really pandemic prep. That's just like living on Earth with things in the air prep. You know, like, you don't need to wait for disease X to show up and wreck us. Like, I think that being aware of what's in the air around us and what we're breathing should just be a regular part of our lives.
- [37:01]
Interviewer
So you're walking around the world with a monitor. You can tell when there's too much. This is, like, such a silly way to put it, but breath in the air, and that's when you'll mask.
- [37:11]
Carl Zimmer
Yes. If I see it going up, I'm not going to wait till it's like, you know, two or three thousand parts per million. I mean, if it's going up over a thousand, and I can tell, like, oh, okay, people are crowding into this space, and I'm not going to be getting fresh air anytime soon. Yeah, I'll totally put on a mask. Absolutely. It may not be guaranteed to protect me from getting Covid or, who knows, tuberculosis or measles or some other highly airborne disease. You know, I might still get sick, but it certainly reduces my risks. And so, like, why wouldn't I do that? And there are scientists who. Who are trying to build really cool detectors that, you know, maybe someday we would carry them around and they would actually sample the air and actually detect the genes of the things in the air and tell us, like, oh, hey, somebody's got influenza in this room. I'm detecting a lot of influenza in the air. That would be amazing. And people are working on that tech right now. I think that would be a great pandemic prep gear to have.
- [38:09]
Interviewer
And so have you made it through? Are you weathering the flu season with less hits to your body than I have because, you know, which rooms to savannah.
- [38:19]
Carl Zimmer
Look, I am not going to claim that I have super skills at avoiding getting sick. I've had Covid three times. Yeah. And my wife hasn't had it once. So it's not just air. You know, there are other factors. There probably are genetics involved and so on, but the research is there. Like, if you look overall at sort of broad, big studies and big reviews of studies, you can see the ways in which you can at least reduce your risk. But again, people who get norovirus and are just having horrible experiences at both ends of their bodies, like, they probably didn't get that through the air. They probably got that through contact with surfaces that were contaminated. There are lots of ways that things can get us sick. It's just that the air is particularly challenging because we all have to breathe and because we just don't have systems in place across the board to keep our air clean. In the same way that you assume that the water that's coming out of your tap is not laced with sewage, right? If it is, you're like, what the hell?
- [39:23]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [39:24]
Carl Zimmer
And you know, you protest and someone gets voted out of office and so on. Like those are expectations we have. And yet we kind of go about our lives just kind of okay with lots of things floating around us that could make us sick.
- [39:46]
Interviewer
Carl, thank you for talking about all this.
- [39:49]
Carl Zimmer
I hope I didn't freak you out too much.
- [39:50]
Interviewer
You did.
- [40:01]
Host 1
Carl Zimmer, Science Writer, Air Measurer he's the author of the new book Airborne. It is a fascinating and occasionally frightening read. It will certainly change the way you look at the air you breathe. You can pick it up now wherever books are sold.
- [41:00]
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- [43:28]
Host 2
Welcome back to the show.
- [43:30]
Host 1
So some big news for us. Producer Noah John, who has been here since the very beginning of Search Engine, is moving on. Noah is someone who, if I were going to make a bet on who at Search Engine, is going to end up with a sizable media empire, he's the person I would certainly bet on. His work is amazing.
- [43:47]
Interviewer
You can keep following him on his.
- [43:48]
Host 1
Own channel without warning. We are so lucky to have gotten.
- [43:51]
Host 2
To work with him.
- [43:52]
Interviewer
Thank you Noah.
- [44:00]
Host 2
Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt and Truthy Pinamani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Holly Patton Theme original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian Additional production support by Shaun Merchant and Kim Kubel. If you'd like to support our show, keep it alive and get ad free episodes, zero reruns and the periodic bonus audio. Please consider signing up for our incognito mode. You learn more at Search Engine Show. Our Executive producer is Leah Rees Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perillo and John Schmidt and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt, Kori Courtney and Hilary Chef. Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at uta. Follow and listen to Search Engine on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.