Viruses in the Air

In the 1930s, two scientists made a very important discovery, but their breakthrough idea failed to spread. In large part because the two were considered so deeply annoying. Reporter Carl Zimmer brings us a story of the scientific process and its very human constraints. Airborne by Carl Zimmer https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/724793/air-borne-by-carl-zimmer/ Apply to work with Search Engine https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4189647662/ Support the show https://www.searchengine.show/join

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  Quick note before we begin this week. Search Engine is looking for some more help on the production front. If you're an incredible researcher, a frightfully organized type A person who alphabetizes their socks, and if you have experience with audio production, we have all the details at the link in our show notes. Thanks. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry Corolla Cross or get a Corolla sedan packed with the latest features, advanced tech, and head-turning style. Take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs, the spacious, family-friendly

• 0:43PJ Vogt?

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• 2:57PJ Vogt?

  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 seasons 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?

• 3:41PJ Vogt?

  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 the story boggled me. I found myself repeating it to everyone I run into.

• 4:14PJ Vogt?

  Can you introduce yourself?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  My name's Carl Zimmer.

• 4:18PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes. And that was the seed of the book certainly is that during the COVID pandemic, I was wondering like, how is this virus getting from one person to another?

• 4:40PJ Vogt?

  And were you like during the 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?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  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

• 5:42Speaker 01

  can be pretty nasty. 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.

• 6:13PJ Vogt?

  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

• 6:54PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  There were just a real visionary couple, a husband and wife team, in the 1930s that led the charge, named William and Mildred Wells.

• 7:32PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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, DC, and she starts working in a microbiology lab, a public health lab, 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

• 8:22Speaker 01

  people were dying in droves, eating raw oysters that were contaminated with bacteria.

• 8:28PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:10PJ Vogt?

  This is the Spanish flu?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  1918 Spanish flu, yeah.

• 9:13PJ Vogt?

  And they don't know how it's spreading?

• 9:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:39PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:55PJ Vogt?

  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. Cover your mouth when you sneeze. Don't share food or water.

• 10:38PJ Vogt?

  Basically, watch out for germs, but don't worry about the air itself.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  This was a mindset that established itself at a very particular time in history, 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.

• 11:13PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  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 getting to know 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

• 12:39Speaker 01

  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, you know, some people at the Harvard School of Public Health were studying other aspects of the health of the air, you know, like fumes and factories and so on. They were studying those kind of health issues. And that may have gotten him thinking like, well, maybe we've been too hasty to dismiss the air.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  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 gonna probably get to them, you know?

• 13:56PJ Vogt?

  And so, the Wellses, like, how were they amassing evidence? Like, what were they doing? What are their experiments?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  One of the most basic things that they had to do is to show that there were germs in the air. And so, what he decided is like, if we're really gonna 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.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  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 he did, lo and behold, hey, there's a lot of stuff floating in the air.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Particularly indoors.

• 15:15PJ Vogt?

  And just to make sure I understand, 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.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 16:24PJ Vogt?

  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. This was a huge discovery. The Wells were called geniuses. They were profiled in Time Magazine. The

• 17:05PJ Vogt?

  New York Times wrote that hopefully the Wells's 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.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  William Wells created this device called the infection machine.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  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 it 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.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  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 of 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.

• 18:55PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  A huge epidemic of measles hit. And you have to remember, this is the 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.

• 19:37PJ Vogt?

  It's just very strange to me because 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?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:19PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:37PJ Vogt?

  And in which what like, what kind of difficult were these two?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I think because they were outsiders, they were always very paranoid that people were going to steal their ideas. The word paranoid act is actually used by a scientist who knew them both very well. Like, people are very honest about it. They're peculiar, they're paranoid act, 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 that they 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

• 21:25Speaker 01

  from now on. And they, of course, rather than trying to find a political solution, were 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 Wells, 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 after a while.

• 21:58PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  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. You know, he was inspired by the centrifuges people had used to separate cream from milk. And so here he is saying like, oh, we could do that with air. And so this colleague at Harvard was like, I bet you that's not going to work. That's totally not going to 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

• 23:11Speaker 01

  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 uncoming figure in the world of science, this kind of personality type.

• 23:32PJ Vogt?

  Part of what makes this story so surprising to Carl Zimmer is that science, frankly, is a place that more than other fields, does tolerate brilliant, difficult people.

• 23:45PJ Vogt?

  If ever there was a place to put up with some jerkiness, it'd be in the fields where someone's contributions can save lives. 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.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  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 savvy in understanding the politics of science in Paris at the time. And he 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 Welleses, you know, it was partly because they weren't very good at building big alliances.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 25:41PJ Vogt?

  In the decades that followed, the Welleses' 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's 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 Wells's ideas continued to flicker through decades of obscurity. Individual scientists pulling on individual threads in the research.

• 26:25PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  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 just saying, no, it's not. World Health Organization actually said COVID is not airborne.

• 27:00PJ Vogt?

  So these people were more successful than the Wells's, but they still struggled to get this idea across?

• 27:08Speaker 01

  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 going to have to like, you know, disinfect the air all over the place in these facilities and then, you know, in the community as well.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  We're not going to 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?

• 28:02PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  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 sort of tips the balance of how you're going to decide whether to do that thing or not.

• 28:19PJ Vogt?

  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. This really works? And it's a little unclear to me, even now, if we're supposed to hear the story of the Wells discovery, lost, then found again, as a tragedy or as an example of the system working, just working at a human pace, under human constraints.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:30PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 30:03PJ Vogt?

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• 32:29PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 32:32PJ Vogt?

  Right now, the worrying disease on the horizon is bird flu. Do we know if bird flu is airborne?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  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 live animal markets in 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, then

• 33:22Speaker 01

  gets on the ground, kind of mixes with the dust, and then that gets kicked up by the circulating air. And if you breathe that in, that could not be good. Now, people can also get sick by inhaling the stuff coming off of birds when they're handling the birds, too. 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's in the United States, it's in birds, but it's also running rampant in cows and cats.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And that's not good because that affords an opportunity for this virus to get more adapted to moving between mammals. And also, people who own cats or people who work at dairies, 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, it's a healthy fear, is that essentially the bird flu could evolve to become a human flu. And part of that... Maybe, how do you become airborne? You know, how do you go from being a gut bug to being something that gets exhaled in little droplets and other people breathe it in?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:07PJ Vogt?

  Ew.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're in a bad situation.

• 35:10PJ Vogt?

  Jesus. What, just for you personally, what is your pandemic prep kit at home look like? Just wondering.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I do take a carbon dioxide monitor around with me. Do you know these things?

• 35:28PJ Vogt?

  No.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  They're 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.

• 35:43PJ Vogt?

  So you can see how much of other people's breath is in the air?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  So I'll take it on planes and it goes up to like 2,000, 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.

• 37:10PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yes, if I see it going up, I'm not going to wait till it's like, you know, 2,000 or 3,000 parts per million. I mean, if it's going up over 1,000 and I can tell like, oh, okay, that 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 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

• 38:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:18PJ Vogt?

  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 Nevada?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Look, I am not going to claim that I have super skills at avoiding getting sick. I've had COVID three times. Um, 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 like 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, 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.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:30PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  If it is, you're like, what the hell?

• 39:33PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  And you protest and someone gets voted out of office and so on. Those are expectations we have. And yet, we go about our lives just OK with lots of things floating around us that could make us sick.

• 39:55PJ Vogt?

  Carl, thank you for talking about all this.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  I hope I didn't freak you out too much.

• 39:59PJ Vogt?

  You did.

• 40:10PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 41:10PJ Vogt?

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• 41:54PJ Vogt?

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• 42:19PJ Vogt?

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• 43:03PJ Vogt?

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• 43:22PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky and let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard Bonds are institutional quality, meaning top-grade products built as a true commitment to your clients. Their impressive lineup features over 80 bond funds, actively driven by a global team of 200 sector specialists, analysts and traders. While other firms push star portfolio managers, Vanguard relies on collective brain power, so every client benefits from shared expertise. Instead of chasing high-stakes gambles that lead to volatile rides, Vanguard delivers steady, reliable and consistent performance designed for the long haul.

• 44:07PJ Vogt?

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• 44:25PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show. 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. You can keep following him on his own channel without warning. We are so lucky to have gotten to work with him. Thank you, Noah.

• 44:56PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pennamineni, 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 Sean Merchant and Kim Kupel. 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 can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Parello, and John Schmidt, and to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josefina

• 45:39PJ Vogt?

  Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orin 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.

• 46:11PJ Vogt?

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