Pod Insights Radiolab Revenge of the Miasma About this episode Today we uncover an invisible killer hidden, for over a hundred years, by reasonable disbelief. Science journalist extraordinaire Carl Zimmer tells us the story of a centuries-long battle of ideas that came to a head, with tragic consequences, in the very recent past. His latest book, called Airborne, details a largely forgotten history of science that never quite managed to get off the ground. Along the way, Carl helps us understand how we can fail, over and over again, to see a truth right in front of our faces. And how we finally came around thanks to scientific evidence hidden inside a song.
EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Carl ZimmerProduced by - Sarah Qariwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Natalie Middleton
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Books - Check out Carl Zimmer’s new book, Airborne (https://zpr.io/Q5bdYrubcwE4)
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0:08 Speaker 01 You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From...
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0:19 Speaker 01 Back in the chair, Latif.
0:21 Speaker 02 I'm so excited. We finally get to do this together. Hey, it's Latif Nasser.
0:24 Speaker 01 And Lulu Miller.
0:25 Speaker 02 And this is Radiolab. Um, hey, welcome back.
0:28 Speaker 01 Thank you.
0:30 Speaker 02 What will remind me, what were you doing this whole time?
0:33 Speaker 01 I was rearing a small baby.
0:35 Speaker 02 Right.
0:36 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah, I was on maternity leave.
0:38 Speaker 02 Okay, so creating life, it sounds like that's, yeah.
0:41 Speaker 01 I was learning to juggle, because now it's, now there's three, so you gotta always have one in the air.
0:45 Speaker 02 But you were also, as I was, to learn scheming.
0:49 Speaker 01 Scheming. I was scheming.
0:50 Speaker 02 For new episodes.
0:51 Speaker 01 I came back on day three, I actually looked back, it was day three, uh, and I, because I had gotten wind of a beautiful but terrifying and arguably kind of urgent story.
1:01 Speaker 02 Hmm.
1:02 Speaker 01 And so I dragged you into the studio totally unprepared.
1:05 Speaker 02 That's true.
1:06 Speaker 01 To meet with one of our favorite Radiolab guests.
1:09 Speaker 03 Hi, guys.
1:09 Speaker 02 Hey!
1:10 Speaker 01 Carl Zimmer. Your ears must have been burdened right then.
1:13 Speaker 03 What have people been saying about me now?
1:15 Speaker 01 Carl Zimmer, the sort of prima ballerina of, of science writing.
1:20 Speaker 02 The best.
1:20 Speaker 03 This is great, thank you so much.
1:22 Speaker 01 He is a columnist for the New York Times, he's written all these gorgeous science books, and he has been working on a new story that is all on your turf. It is history of medicine.
1:31 Speaker 02 Wow.
1:31 Speaker 01 And I do not think you know it.
1:35 Speaker 02 Really?
1:36 Speaker 01 And it begins with a man named Fred Meyer.
1:39 Speaker 03 So, you probably have never heard of Fred Meyer.
1:41 Speaker 02 No, never.
1:42 Speaker 03 So Fred Meyer, he started out as what he described as a watermelon doctor.
1:48 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:48 Speaker 01 This was in 1915, by the way.
1:50 Speaker 03 So he, he was a plant pathologist, he, and he was actually in college, like, working one summer down in Washington DC, and he noticed this huge pile of rotten watermelons next to a, a boxcar.
2:02 Speaker 01 And when he cracked them open, he noticed they weren't rotting in, like, the normal way, they were weirdly black and crazily slimy.
2:09 Speaker 03 And, you know, this is the kind of thing he studies, so he takes some of the watermelons in his arms back to the lab. And he actually discovers a fungus that is killing them. And this is actually a new, new to science. So like, so he discovers his own disease. He's like 18 or 19.
2:26 Speaker 02 Wow.
2:26 Speaker 03 And so then he starts to like, think about, well, how does this fungus get from one watermelon to another?
2:32 Speaker 01 So he starts looking for this disease out on watermelon farms in the fields. And he starts noticing that it can jump from one watermelon to another, even if they aren't next to each other. So pretty quick, he realizes.
2:44 Speaker 03 This fungus goes through the air.
2:47 Speaker 03 It sends up spores that travel around to get to new fruit.
2:53 Speaker 01 Now, at the time, every scientist and honestly, every four year old knew that things like dandelion seeds and pollen can float through the air. But the idea that living things could travel through the air and stay alive long enough to infect plants that make them sick? That was totally new to Meyer. So he started to wonder, like, how far can these things travel?
3:14 Speaker 03 Like, how high do they go?
3:16 Speaker 01 You mean, how high, like, up into the air?
3:19 Speaker 03 Yes.
3:19 Speaker 02 Oh.
3:20 Speaker 03 So he builds these like really crazy crude devices. Basically, he sticks like a Petri dish onto a stick. And he starts getting in airplanes.
3:30 Speaker 01 This is the early 1930s, so we're talking little propeller planes, you know, with the pilot seat open to the air.
3:35 Speaker 03 And he gets into these, you know, open cockpits.
3:37 Speaker 01 With his little Petri dishes on a stick.
3:39 Speaker 03 And he's just hanging them out in the air, you know, in these biplanes.
3:43 Speaker 02 Wow.
3:44 Speaker 03 You know, people think he's crazy, you know, he goes on blimps and he's sticking these things out from the gun on blimps. And the blimp crew are like, what are you doing? But, but he's catching stuff.
3:55 Speaker 01 He catches microbes that usually live down on the earth on potatoes and lettuce and celery. Another that ferments cheese, another that was known to kill trees, all floating around thousands of feet up in the air.
4:08 Speaker 03 Then he finds out that Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne are going to be flying across the Atlantic. Charles Lindbergh designs a special instrument to hold out of his plane to catch things. And he does.
4:20 Speaker 02 Wow.
4:21 Speaker 03 Over Greenland, over the Atlantic, he's catching all sorts of stuff.
4:25 Speaker 01 He attaches his device to balloons that are being sent up into the stratosphere.
4:29 Speaker 03 And 12 miles up, he catches stuff.
4:32 Speaker 01 All these invisible, tiny little creatures floating around alive in the air around us, but also miles up into the atmosphere.
4:45 Speaker 01 And eventually, because of all this stuff he's finding.
4:48 Speaker 03 He's actually able to persuade the government, the US government, that they should basically like, open up a bureau for this life in the air.
4:58 Speaker 01 And he actually coins a term for this whole field.
5:00 Speaker 03 He calls it aerobiology, which no one's heard of before. But just like the government is supporting a weather service, he wants to basically have an aerobiology service.
5:11 Speaker 02 Like it would be like, these bugs are in the air today. Like, watch out for the, is it that kind of thing?
5:15 Speaker 03 That would be one thing he was ultimately open for, yeah. And the government agreed to this.
5:21 Speaker 02 Wow.
5:21 Speaker 03 In 1938, they were like, yes, go for it. So for his first big expedition for this grand new project, which he's now finally getting paid for, he gets on one of the first commercial flights that's going across the Pacific.
5:35 Speaker 02 Right.
5:35 Speaker 03 And he's very excited, gets on onboard the plane that's supposed to get to Manila. It never gets there.
5:44 Speaker 03 There's a huge search. The US Navy just goes scouring the Pacific for days. This is all in the news. No one ever found the plane. So he disappears. And basically, this brave new science of aerobiology kind of disappears with him.
6:02 Speaker 02 Wow.
6:03 Speaker 03 In less than a year after he coined the name aerobiology.
6:07 Speaker 01 The freaking founder of aerobiology disappears into thin air.
6:11 Speaker 03 Yeah. And in some ways, it seems almost cursed.
6:16 Speaker 01 So this is why I wanted to talk to Carl, because he actually just wrote a book. Can you describe the cover?
6:21 Speaker 03 Yes. It's got a groovy yet sinister rainbow cloud on it.
6:28 Speaker 01 It's totally groovy yet sinister. The book is called Airborne, and it's all about this whole other layer of life that lives up there in the air.
6:35 Speaker 03 This is the story of this amazing science that has been trying to get off the ground. For centuries.
6:45 Speaker 01 A field that, despite a trail of other scientists like Meyer, who saw with clear evidence how alive and sometimes dangerous the air could be, just wasn't able to break through until, well, until a moment in very recent history, when millions of lives were on the line.
7:04 Speaker 03 That's, yeah. And I just was trying to wrap my arms around it with this book.
7:11 Speaker 01 And what Carl found was this eerie history of ideas, ideas that were wrong for the right reasons and right for the wrong reasons, and a terrible and complicated truth somewhere in the middle.
7:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, and it's a long, crazy story.
7:28 Speaker 02 We're here for it. We got some popcorn.
7:30 Speaker 01 How far back do we go?
7:32 Speaker 03 I think we do have to go back, you know, 2,500 years.
7:37 Speaker 01 All right.
7:37 Speaker 02 Okay.
7:38 Speaker 03 To Hippocrates.
7:39 Speaker 01 Okay, so we're in Greece. This is a couple hundred B.C. And Hippocrates, in addition to being, you know, do no harm Hippocratic oath guy, was supposedly one of the first to argue that diseases might not be coming from angry gods trying to punish you, but rather from nature itself.
7:56 Speaker 03 Hippocrates developed a really powerful concept that if you look at these different diseases that people got, they got them because they breathed in bad air. Hippocrates would refer to it as a miasma.
8:14 Speaker 01 What is like the Cliff's Notes of how he saw them? Are they just like bad vibes?
8:19 Speaker 02 Smoke monster.
8:20 Speaker 01 Ghosts?
8:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:21 Speaker 03 It was a corruption. Think of it as a corruption of the air. So corrupt air, you know, might smell bad. You know, marsh water could give off fumes or even a rotting corpse. You know, the alignment of planets might also somehow disturb the air.
8:40 Speaker 01 And while that may seem silly to us now, it was a very useful idea.
8:45 Speaker 03 It seemed to work. And so classical medicine really just sort of took up miasmas.
8:53 Speaker 03 Just as a fact.
8:54 Speaker 01 And it's not a bad idea. I mean, you get it. Like, you see a whole town at the same moment getting a thing.
9:00 Speaker 02 I live in LA right now, post wildfire. Everyone is afraid of like random bits of ash or asbestos or lead or whatever, just randomly in the air. And I get how miasmas could really feel real, because right now, they kind of do.
9:17 Speaker 03 Right. So in a way, that kind of stretchiness of the miasma idea helped it to just last a really long time.
9:24 Speaker 01 And which kind of diseases did this account for?
9:27 Speaker 03 It seems like everything. I mean, it's just a long, long list of diseases that Hippocrates and then later people would ascribe to miasmas.
9:36 Speaker 02 Wasn't it like malaria? It's like bad area? Like, it's like from bad air, right?
9:41 Speaker 03 Right, right. So malaria got its name in the Renaissance, I believe, in Italy. This was an idea that in various forms really like took hold and it worked.
9:52 Speaker 01 And this was the central belief for what caused disease for about 2,000 years. Then comes the Enlightenment, and you've got all kinds of new ways to investigate the world and think about what counts as evidence and great new ways of literally seeing the world.
10:08 Speaker 03 So in the 1600s, people are inventing the first microscopes, and they're looking through the microscopes and they're seeing all these tiny little things squirming around. These anemicules, these germs, and this starts to give some people the idea that, hey, like, these might be things that make people sick.
10:31 Speaker 01 Basically, this is the birth of germ theory. But at the time, the bad air people thought this was ridiculous.
10:38 Speaker 03 This is just dreaming. You are just letting your imagination run wild. Where's your actual proof? You're seeing these things through a microscope. Then there are these people dying of the plague. You haven't shown us that any bacteria are causing that plague. And so authorities just brushed away the germ theory of disease decade after decade after decade.
11:01 Speaker 01 So this debate of, hey, I think it's in the germs. No, it's in the air. I think it's in the germs. No, it's in the air. That goes on and on and on with the germ theory people building up more and more evidence and the air people, the miasma people, just shouting them down until. The late 1800s.
11:17 Speaker 03 In the city of Hamburg in 1892, there was an outbreak of cholera.
11:22 Speaker 01 You know, terrible, people turning blue in the face, collapsing in the street, dying by the thousands.
11:28 Speaker 03 And all the medical authorities in Hamburg, they were all big believers in miasma. So it's 1892 and you, people in charge are still treating this like a miasma. And there was this leading figure in terms of public health named Max von Peppenkoffer. He was incredibly famous and everyone took his opinions incredibly seriously.
11:52 Speaker 01 And his view was that cholera was caused by fumes coming out of the ground.
11:56 Speaker 03 And so you just needed to make sure that the ground was clean. And then these fumes wouldn't come into people's houses and give them cholera.
12:04 Speaker 01 Meaning like clean of garbage?
12:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, garbage, waste.
12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:08 Speaker 03 And so people were saying, hey, this is what von Peppenkoffer says. And everyone followed what he said.
12:16 Speaker 01 Now, on the other side, you've got this German doctor named Robert Koch. He was a germ theorist and his argument was that no, cholera was not in the air. It was a bacteria moving through the water that people were drinking. But Peppenkoffer?
12:29 Speaker 03 He kept resisting it, saying, no, it's cholera is not spread through the water. He would just refuse to believe it. Like, no, no, no, it's not the water. It's not the water. No.
12:39 Speaker 01 Spoiler alert, it was the water. But Peppenkoffer was so sure of himself.
12:43 Speaker 03 He actually asked Robert Koch for some of the cholera bacteria from Hamburg. And he had it prepared in a tube. And he had a bunch of his followers in front of him and he drank it.
12:58 Speaker 02 Oh, wow.
13:01 Speaker 01 That was the strength of his conviction of no, this is miasma. This is the air. I will drink cholera soup.
13:06 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah. There's this amazing line he wrote later. He said, "Even if I had deceived myself and the experiment endangered my life, I should face death calmly, for it would not be as a thoughtless and cowardly suicide. I should die in the cause of science like a soldier on the field of honor."
13:24 Speaker 02 Wow.
13:25 Speaker 01 Wow.
13:25 Speaker 03 And, well, he survived and he talked about it later.
13:28 Speaker 02 He survived?
13:28 Speaker 01 Like, how did he survive that?
13:30 Speaker 03 Well, so, I mean, the awkward fact is that a lot of people who get infected with cholera don't get that sick.
13:38 Speaker 02 Hmm.
13:39 Speaker 03 And it turns out that Robert Koch's colleagues who gave him the bacteria kind of had an idea of what he was gonna do. And so they actually, they actually took their sample from a patient who had had a very mild case.
13:50 Speaker 01 Oh, because they didn't want him to die?
13:52 Speaker 03 That's what they said later.
13:52 Speaker 02 That's so nice of them.
13:54 Speaker 03 Yes, but he didn't know it. So after he recovered, he wrote a note to Robert Koch. He said, "Herd Dr. Pettencoffer has now drunk the entire contents and is happy to inform Herd Dr. Professor Koch that he remains in good health."
14:09 Speaker 02 Hmm.
14:09 Speaker 03 So I think that was a little kind of screw you moment.
14:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:13 Speaker 03 But with this terrible outbreak in Hamburg.
14:17 Speaker 01 Once Robert Koch comes on the scene with his germ theory ideas.
14:20 Speaker 03 He supplies clean water to people. He has buildings cleaned out and they stop the cholera outbreak.
14:28 Speaker 02 Wow.
14:28 Speaker 01 It was a clear message that this disease did not come through the air, did not travel in the air, it was bacteria in the water.
14:35 Speaker 03 And, you know, Robert Koch says, "Okay, Germany as a whole needs to deal with diseases like this from now on this way. We're done with miasmas, it's all germ theory now."
14:47 Speaker 03 When the germ theory of disease won out, all these different diseases that had been thought to be spread through the air just by miasmas turned out to have nothing to do with that. So malaria, you mentioned, that's not bad air, that's mosquitoes. Rigworm.
15:03 Speaker 01 Not spread by fumes, but instead?
15:05 Speaker 03 By ordinary skin contact. Syphilis.
15:07 Speaker 01 Not caused by corrupt air, but?
15:09 Speaker 03 By a kind of bacteria transmitted only by sex. Vibrio in Salmonella.
15:13 Speaker 01 Came from contaminated meat or water.
15:15 Speaker 03 The rabies virus required the service of live animals, which bit their victims. Jail fever proved to be caused not by prison air, but by lice-borne bacteria. Rats carried fleas infected with Yersinia pestis.
15:28 Speaker 01 And that, not the air, is how people got the plague.
15:30 Speaker 03 And so you just have this whole, long list of diseases where microbiologists in the late 1800s would definitively prove.
15:39 Speaker 01 Were caused by germs, not the air.
15:43 Speaker 03 Didn't seem to them like there was anything left for the air. You, I mean, you literally like have these public health authorities at the time saying things like, "A patient's breath is free of germs." Just flat out, "Forget the air."
15:58 Speaker 01 And that basically became medical dogma for the next century. But here is what I love about Carl's book is that he finds this whole mostly forgotten history, this, this trail of scientists who are piling up evidence that, okay, yeah, germs can cause disease, but also germs can travel through the air.
16:16 Speaker 03 Laying out very clearly that people can potentially get each other sick with all sorts of diseases through the air over long distance.
16:26 Speaker 01 So in the early 1900s, you've got our watermelon guy Fred Meyer doing his thing with plant diseases. But then there are these other stories of other scientists who were taking that idea and extending it to human disease. And many of them, like Meyer disappearing over the ocean, would end up being mostly forgotten.
16:43 Speaker 03 So you do not know who William and Mildred Wells are?
16:46 Speaker 01 So. So around the time that Meyer is flying around with Lindbergh, this married scientific duo, William and Mildred Wells.
16:55 Speaker 03 Take a cream separator, something you'd separate cream from milk.
16:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:59 Speaker 01 And they figure out a way to kind of MacGyver it into a device.
17:03 Speaker 03 Glass cylinder called the Wells Air Centrifuge.
17:05 Speaker 01 That would spin around and in so doing, separate out and capture bacteria and viruses in the air.
17:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:11 Speaker 01 And then they go on, or at least William goes on to like, show this in animals too, right? To show transmission, airborne transmission.
17:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. So William gets busy in his lab, building something that the newspapers called the infection machine. Basically, what he does is he has a chamber, kind of a big bell jar, and he can put animals in there. He can put mice in there, he can put a rabbit in there, and he can create these mists of disease, influenza or tuberculosis. And he is able to show that these animals, just inhaling this stuff, get sick.
17:49 Speaker 01 Now, even at that time, scientists knew that diseases could be carried by a cough or whatever, you know, travel maybe five, six feet. But the Wellses were discovering something very different from that.
17:59 Speaker 03 These, these were not, you know, big droplets that were, you know, shot out of someone's mouth when they sneeze and then just dropped to the ground. These are joblets that had to float aerosols, sometimes people call them.
18:11 Speaker 01 Which could travel and cause disease over much, much larger distances.
18:15 Speaker 03 And so the demonstrating that these things could get so far was, that was quite something.
18:22 Speaker 01 Which like feels like that should be revolutionary in that moment. Like that feels like it should be massive, scary, big, important news for public health for a lot of people.
18:35 Speaker 03 You know, a lot of other scientists and doctors were very skeptical. It did not help that.
18:43 Speaker 01 Why, why, why is everyone still so confident germs don't go through the air?
18:49 Speaker 03 It's, it's, I think it's one of the hardest things to figure out like why people don't recognize something that's just out there. And, you know, and I would, you know, I, let me put it this way. The Wells's enemies were not stupid. They just would look at the evidence differently. They would have different kinds of thresholds for what would convince them. What, you know, what is going to make them step away from just, you know, generations of what people are taught in medical school?
19:26 Speaker 01 And also, Carl says, I mean, just think about the practical public health side, the implications of if this were true. The idea that disease is just everywhere in the air is very daunting.
19:37 Speaker 03 You know, a lot of the guidelines for staying healthy are very individual based. You know, here's what you as an individual should do.
19:45 Speaker 01 Right.
19:45 Speaker 03 Just stay a few feet away from people who look sick. If you have a cough, cover your mouth. But, you know, if it's all in the air around us.
19:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah.
19:55 Speaker 03 You know, you have to think differently.
19:57 Speaker 01 So the findings about the air that Wells and this trail of other scientists were seeing through the 30s and 40s and 50s, they just never quite took hold.
20:05 Speaker 03 It was all hidden knowledge. I mean, these people were almost entirely forgotten.
20:11 Speaker 01 And then, some 70 years later, we would all go through the painful process of finally learning to think differently. Thanks in part to a song.
20:37 Speaker 01 That's coming up after this break.
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22:21 Speaker 00 I'm Merlon Woods.
22:22 Speaker 05 I'm Nigel Poor. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia.
22:27 Speaker 00 When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California.
22:31 Speaker 05 And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast.
22:38 Speaker 00 Like cooking meals in a prison cell.
22:40 Speaker 05 Keeping little pets.
22:41 Speaker 00 Prison nicknames.
22:42 Speaker 05 And trying to be a parent from inside.
22:44 Speaker 00 Stories about life on the inside, shared by those who live it.
22:48 Speaker 05 Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
22:55 Speaker 02 All right. Okay, here we are, LUTF.
22:57 Speaker 01 Lulu.
22:57 Speaker 02 Radiolab.
22:58 Speaker 01 We're back with Carl Zimmer.
23:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:01 Speaker 01 Who started us way back, over 2,000 years ago, but is about to bring us up to the very recent past.
23:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, so on March 10th, 2020.
23:10 Speaker 01 A group of about 60 people.
23:12 Speaker 03 Come into this church on the outskirts of Skagit Valley in Washington. They set up chairs, somebody closes the door, the heater is running for a while and it shuts off. And they start to sing.
23:30 Speaker 01 This group is called the Skagit Valley Choral, and this is one of their rehearsals.
23:37 Speaker 01 Now, the people in this chorus, many of whom were retired, they knew about the sort of early spread of COVID.
23:43 Speaker 03 There are starting to be reports of it in Washington State, so they did take precautions.
23:50 Speaker 01 People who had symptoms, like sneezing or coughing, stayed home. Those that came kept their distance from one another as much as they could. They sanitized surfaces in the room. They washed their hands. So they were following all of the CDC guidelines at the time.
24:02 Speaker 03 And they all thought, we're doing what the Centers for Disease Control have been telling us to do, so we should be okay. But a couple of days later, some of them start to feel terrible.
24:14 Speaker 01 Most of the 60 people in the room that day got sick.
24:17 Speaker 03 Just boom, just in that one rehearsal. And a couple, three people ended up in the hospital, and two of them died.
24:24 Speaker 01 And soon, it was all over the news as one of the earliest really big spreading events.
24:28 Speaker 03 This little singing group in the corner of Washington State suddenly became internationally famous.
24:34 Speaker 01 But for the people who were there that day.
24:36 Speaker 03 They said, how can this be happening? We did everything we were supposed to. It's not like we were all, you know, hugging each other and we weren't sneezing on each other. We were just singing.
24:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:46 Speaker 03 And people who were 40 feet away from each other were getting sick.
24:50 Speaker 01 But that feeling of disconnect, says Carl, was actually a symptom of the way experts and public health officials were thinking about COVID in those first few months.
24:58 Speaker 03 In March 2020, when these singers got sick, you actually had public health authorities saying explicitly, COVID is not airborne.
25:09 Speaker 01 Focus was on staying home if you were sick, you know, wiping down surfaces, washing your hands.
25:13 Speaker 03 And that is all really based on this idea that a disease like the flu is spread in big droplets that, you know, you wipe your mouth or your nose, you smear it on a doorknob, or maybe you cough and you like cough right in someone's face. And so that was it. And, you know, I, as a reporter, was trying to make sense of this disease. Like, if we all were, did you wipe down your groceries?
25:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, totally.
25:36 Speaker 03 Me too. And, you know, I would tell people like, yeah, wash your hands, wash your hands. And I even went on Radio Lab and said, you should all wash your hands because that's one of the great classic ways to stop the spread of infection. And that's true.
25:49 Speaker 02 I helped produce that episode. I still stand by that episode. That was great.
25:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, you definitely still wash your hands, but you can't assume that washing your hands will keep you safe from an entirely new virus. And we had to learn the hard way. And I mean, I can remember actually going to have dinner with friends. And, you know, I just said, I'm not going to hug you. I'm not going to shake your hand. You know, I was trying to be, you know, good and careful.
26:16 Speaker 01 And any mask on?
26:17 Speaker 03 Of course not.
26:19 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
26:20 Speaker 03 It was ridiculous in hindsight. We sat down, you know, after putting on this big show of not making contact, we sit down and we talk. Like, you know, knowing what I know now, I think, wow, I was endangering my friends' lives. If you're sitting indoors across the dinner table and having a long, lively conversation, and if you have COVID, they could get COVID too. You don't have to sneeze on them. You don't have to drink from the same glass. You just talk or sing or breathe.
26:52 Speaker 02 Right.
26:53 Speaker 01 Now, of course, by spring 2020, there were scientists arguing that COVID had to be airborne, you know, that it could travel further than just Droplets from a sneeze or a cough. But it took a really long time for that idea to be accepted.
27:07 Speaker 03 And it wasn't just taking a long time. People were yelling at each other. And the World Health Organization was saying, cut it out. You know, COVID is not airborne. Like, everything was very strong, opposite poles. And, and I just thought, what, what is going on? Like, why is it so hard? And I didn't appreciate just, you know, all the history behind this.
27:29 Speaker 01 And now that he does, Carl blames miasmas, in a way. Or the fact that germ theory was born largely in opposition to the idea that the air could carry sickness. Once that idea had been debunked, it took its place alongside spontaneous generation or the idea that the earth was flat as foolish ideas that science had debunked, which made it really hard for the occasional bits of evidence that there was life in the air to break through.
27:56 Speaker 03 You know, I would talk to people who, who, you know, I talked to Anthony Fauci. I said, what happened? And he's, and he's like, well, look, you just have to understand, like, this is what we were taught in medical school. It's what we were all taught. We just didn't take airborne infection seriously. You know, he learned a hard lesson in COVID, and he admits that.
28:14 Speaker 01 And interestingly, one of the things that finally brought medical health professionals around was what happened at the Skagit Valley Corral.
28:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there were a few scientists who said, folks, this might be airborne. And one of the, one of the things that they did was that they got in touch with the Skagit Valley Corral, because it looked from the news reports like this might be a classic case of airborne transmission. And so they actually collaborated with the singers. And they tried to reconstruct what had happened and, you know, how, how was the air moving that night in the church? So some of these scientists published a paper on this case. And it turned out to be some of the most compelling evidence that COVID can be airborne.
29:04 Speaker 01 Wow, I never knew that, that second act of the story.
29:14 Speaker 02 Feels like the story you're telling, it's like a story of two orthodoxies, two ways to explain how and why we get sick that are both kinda right.
29:28 Speaker 03 You know, the idea of miasma was, in a lot of ways, really, really wrong. And a lot of people may have died because of it. And the germ theory is, in many ways, really, really right. And a lot of people's lives have been saved. But it does seem like in that swinging away from the old ideas, people started to jump to conclusions that maybe went too far.
29:55 Speaker 01 Or at least left us all with a blind spot.
29:58 Speaker 03 I mean, I sometimes imagine like if we had glasses where it could see like living things in the air.
30:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:04 Speaker 03 We might think differently. So we've been talking a lot about, you know, living things coming out of our noses and our mouths. But, you know, things get into the air in all sorts of ways. Like if you go to the beach and you're looking at the waves, like every time those waves crash, they send up tiny bubbles of seawater, some of which have bacteria and algae. So if you're walking along the beach, you would see just these plumes of living things like rising up, blowing onto land or going up higher into the sky. If you take a walk in the woods, you would see all this stuff streaming out of the soil. You would actually see lots of bacteria and fungi and things actually coming off of the leaves on the trees.
30:49 Speaker 03 You know, there would be all this stuff that you would recognize as being constantly like pumped up into the air all the time from everywhere.
31:00 Speaker 01 Are there things that like play out their whole life up there? Are there dramas and worlds and existences up there in the aerobio?
31:08 Speaker 03 Well, so, you know, there are lots of bacteria in the clouds. Okay. And they're actually possibly eating the clouds.
31:16 Speaker 01 What?
31:18 Speaker 03 They are eating the clouds. There's organic matter in the clouds, and it's possible that bacteria can find just enough of that stuff to swallow up, to grow very, very slowly, but to grow and maybe even to divide in the clouds. Weird. And, you know, when it rains, it's not just raining water, it's raining lots of bacteria as well.
31:38 Speaker 01 How far has, like, how far has something been seen to travel in terms of a germ or a bacteria or something that could cause human illness?
31:47 Speaker 03 There's a, there's a terrible disease called Kawasaki disease that affects children. A really harsh disease with kids. They have very strong immune reactions. Their, their tongue, you know, turns the color of strawberries. And kids will get terrible heart damage from this disease, Kawasaki disease, and that may kill them later.
32:10 Speaker 03 Nobody has found the germ that causes Kawasaki disease. It seems like it's caused by some kind of germ, but no one has found it yet. But what they have found is that in Japan, flare-ups of Kawasaki disease seem to correlate with strong winds and dust coming from China.
32:31 Speaker 01 Whoa.
32:33 Speaker 03 And we get Kawasaki disease in the, in the west coast of the United States. And those cases seem to correlate with the weather patterns going across the Pacific.
32:42 Speaker 01 My god, with a wind current coming all the way from China?
32:46 Speaker 03 All the way from China, maybe.
32:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:48 Speaker 03 Maybe, maybe there's some fungus or some other living thing that gets kicked up with the dust in China and then gets picked up by the wind and then just keeps going.
32:59 Speaker 01 Thousands of miles all the way across the ocean, still alive enough to, maybe.
33:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, still capable of killing a child.
33:08 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
33:08 Speaker 03 You, you'll see sometimes these amazing maps. Of the world's weather, you know, seeing, you know, clouds moving along and low pressure and high pressure systems and so on across the whole planet. Aerobiologists would like to do that for life. They would like to create a global map in motion, showing how living things are moving around the world in the air. That is a dream that they are working on.
33:37 Speaker 01 Um, I guess my, I have one like big last question for you, Carl. This concept of the aerobium and a world up there in the clouds or up high, I mean, what else could be in there? Can you just kind of give us the profile? Like, you know, we've got aquatic worlds and earth world and like, what else is up there?
33:59 Speaker 03 Um, I think that there is a lot of life there that we just don't know about yet. Even in the microbial world, when microbiologists like are capturing microbes in the air, they tend to find totally new species. These are species they just didn't know about. And so, you know, with viruses and bacteria, fungi, there's just a huge diversity of things up there that we don't know about.
34:25 Speaker 01 Young scientists wanting to make a name for yourself, go to the air.
34:29 Speaker 03 Totally go, absolutely, absolutely. Go to the air. Yeah. And I don't want people to like leave the book saying like, okay, that's it. I'm never breathing again. We probably actually get some benefit from breathing the aerobium. Um, it just, you know, you just want to be breathing in, um, the living things in say like forests, for example, and, and, you know, our, our immune systems might actually be primed to have kind of a partnership with these things that we breathe. I mean, some of them, like we breathe it in and it ends up in our lungs or in our gut and just stays there. Like we breathe in stuff and some of it just stays. And maybe these are partners that we need.
35:26 Speaker 02 Thank you, Lulu, for dragging me into that interview. It was a real breath of fresh air. I feel like you actually can't say that on public radio.
35:35 Speaker 01 No, it's Terry Gross's domain. Well, yes, thank you for joining me in the conversation. And for everyone listening, Carl's book is called Airborne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. And it is truly, it's so beautiful. It is full of so many more stories you didn't know and really gorgeous writing around the chorus, around all kinds of stuff with COVID, his own lack of understanding and learning. And it's gorgeous. Airborne, go check it out.
36:04 Speaker 02 Even though it doesn't have wings, it's floating to a bookstore near you. This episode was reported, honestly, it was reported by Carl Zimmer.
36:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
36:14 Speaker 02 His book, but it was reported and produced by Sarikari and fact checking by Natalie Middleton.
36:20 Speaker 01 Thanks so much for listening. See you next week.
36:23 Speaker 02 Bye.
36:27 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Rachel, and I'm from Norsjöping, Sweden. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Aberroth and is edited by Thorin Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasamvandan, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarikari, Sarah Sandbeck, Anissa Vitza, Arian Weck, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
37:07 Speaker 06 Hi, this is Charlie Liu calling from El Pescadero, Mexico. Leadership support for Radiolab's science program is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simon Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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