YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Zimmer

lines on the record: 56
first: 2025-03-05
most recent: 2025-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“What will I do next? Well, I'm working on a podcast. I can't really talk about it at length right now. There'll be more details later. So I'm kind of entering your world a little bit. And it's fun and frightening. And then it'll just be a question of thinking about what the next book is. And I generally just let those ideas come to me because it's got to be something that's going to really be something I can live with for years. I don't choose the next book lightly. So it hasn't come yet.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when I was 10, we moved to pretty close to the Delaware River in Hunteron County in New Jersey. And so that was when my father was elected to Congress, that was his district.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, New Jersey politics is got a rich, long history of corruption and just rough and tumble kind of activity. I was very proud to see my dad stay above that fray. You know, I live in Connecticut now, and Connecticut's got its share of corruption too, but still, you know, New Jersey was really quite a quite a place to see all sorts of scandals and action.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I guess I don't really, it's interesting that I'm sort of drawing a blank on that simply because I am just so dazzled by so much that I learn about in terms of the scientific world. So, you know, what is the scientific mainstream is just can be quite mind-blowing to everybody else. So if I just say offhand, like, oh yeah, there are billions of microbes in that cloud you see in the sky. People say like, you're crazy. I'll be like, I'm not crazy. So I am a sort of scientifically mainstream sort of person, I guess. And to everybody else, I seem a little crazy.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well Wow, it's... The thing is that when I am writing about the science itself in terms of like the scientific findings that are just coming out every day and I tell people about them, they'll say like, what, that is crazy? And I'll just be like, I'm just telling you about what scientists are discovering about our world. And so, you know, if I describe what whale scientists are discovering about how whales communicate, you know, I'm not going wildly beyond what they're finding and their theories, but to most people, that's crazy that whales can hear each other across oceans and can, you know, change their songs.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's something about our health. But how do you really rigorously test those things? I haven't seen a lot of rigorous tests of the different hypotheses. I've just seen people say like, well, this could explain it, which is fine, but not totally satisfying.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, one of them might be that, you know, we live, kids grow up in an environment where just, you know, everyday life is more about the kinds of thinking that you encounter on an IQ test. using digital devices, for example. And just like there could be just a way that the kind of life we're leading just leads to people doing better on IQ tests. Now, you know, certainly some people do better than others. And is there an influence of DNA on that? Yes, I think the evidence is there that there is. It's not necessarily a huge account. But in any case, you can have these different things happening all at once is something interesting. It's frustrating that it's really hard to actually take these different hypotheses about the Flint effect.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I've read about it in part because it's just this fascinating thing that there has been this increase in IQ scores and certainly not a result of some sort of genetic process. You cannot explain a rise in IQ scores in so many different countries because somehow people are being born with different kinds of DNA in some sort of like evolutionary process. That is not happening. So what is happening? You know, I think that there probably are several different explanations for it.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And whether they should or not, I think is a separate issue. But again, I think one of the dangers is that people will convince themselves that the information we have About DNA is going to ensure things about their kids that they can't be sure about. And then you're going to have this over lifetime of watching your kid not live up to your genetically encoded expectations. That's one of many dangers I see in going down this road.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certainly, you know, I mean, with IVF, people are going to want to select the embryos that have the most likely chance of surviving. You know, you're going to take a look for any sort of clear abnormalities. And, you know, it certainly is possible to, you know, let's say that you have a dominant genetic disorder like Huntington's disease. You know, the technology is there that you could say like, okay, we've created these fertilized embryos. Let's not use the ones that are carrying this marker. You can even go before that. Potentially, you could say like, okay, we're going to, even before fertilization, say like, okay, we're going to just take out the sperm or the eggs that have a marker for one of these strongly inherited diseases like Huntington's disease. Will people then, you know, move on to that future? Like that, I can't predict whether they will or not.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can certainly imagine people wanting to do that sort of stuff regardless of the strength of the approach. And certainly we have seen, you know, even in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized, who should be allowed into the United States or not. So, for example, Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point. So especially the Jews from Eastern Europe. So we have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump from the kind of basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often serve their own interests. And I think we should be on guard that we not do that again.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the question that we started with was about actually like uploading DNA. And so there then the question becomes like, how much of that information about the future can you get out of DNA? I think that you just have to be incredibly cautious about jumping to conclusions about it just because there are the genome is a wild and woolly place in there and the genome exists in environments. And even if you see sort of broad correlations on a population level, as a college admission person, I would certainly not feel confident like just scanning someone's DNA for information in that regard.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're very kind. I mean, but what do you mean by intelligent? I'd like to think I'm pretty good with words and that I can understand scientific concepts. I remember in college getting to a certain point with calculus and being like, I'm done. And then watching other people like sail on.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The term that a scientist in this field would use would be heritable, not inheritable. And heritability is a slippery thing to think about. I write a lot about that in my book. She has her mother's laugh, which is about heredity in general. And heritability. Really is just saying, like, okay, in a certain situation, if I look at different people or different animals or different plants, how much are their variation in their genome? That's it. Can you then use that variability to then make predictions about what's going to happen in the future? That is a totally different question. But it's not totally.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a property of matter. And scientists are trying to explain it, and some of them are trying to explain what the theory, superconductivity is a property of matter. There were a bunch of theories that were put forward about it, including by Einstein, and that were wrong. And it wasn't until eventually some people came up with the right theory that really clicked in and had a powerful explanatory power. So we're not there yet with life. And so maybe Lee Cronin is going to be like Einstein and he's wrong, or maybe he will be one of the people who was right.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And he has, it's been really interesting watching assembly theory sort of come to the fore recently. And some scientists really take badly to it in a very hostile way. But as is often the case, it feels like sometimes people are just talking past each other and they're not really speaking the same language. So I think because assembly theory is new. And decide whether it holds up or not. I think as I argue in Life Sedge, life is a”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make life. He's actively trying to make life right now. And a lot of people think he's kind of crazy. A lot of people think he's quite brilliant. Some people think he's both. I like him.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life on Earth already blows our minds in many ways, at least mine, but life on other worlds, maybe that, you know, maybe that bet is right and there's life on Enceladus or some other icy moon, it might be really, really, really strange, but maybe we can recognize it by this assembly index. Not only could this be assembly theory be a way to recognize life, but it might be actually a way Le Cronin thinks to make life. In other words, it guides you in basically creating a set of chemical reactions where you're creating these right now he's got these robots that are basically making droplets with different chemicals in them in these vast number of combinations. And he's wondering if they will eventually start to sort of take on some of the hallmarks of life. In other words, yes, he is trying.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Selikronin is a chemist in Scotland, University of Glasgow, and he has this idea that you can explain life with a theory, a theory that he and others call assembly theory, which is about basically like how many steps does it take for something to get produced? And the things in our bodies, you know, the molecules that make us up, some of them are very small and simple, but some of them are exquisitely big and complex. And Lee and others argue that life is what is able to assemble things beyond a certain threshold. And so this would be a way to actually like identify life on a planet, even if you don't know what life is made of. I mean, we can't assume that life is just made of DNA. Like that's an unreasonable assumption.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, no one's offered me the money yet, so I haven't really had to put my money where my mouth is yet. But yeah, that's something to think about.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's highly unlikely, but I think it's likely enough that I would love for us to go check it out. And even Venus, there are actually other people who say, well, forget those icy moons, forget Mars. What about Venus? And this actually ties into airborne, my book, because you might think Venus, that's crazy. I mean, it's so hot on the surface of Venus you can melt lead in that air. But the fact is that when you get pretty high up in the atmosphere there, there are clouds up there where things aren't that bad. And, you know, we have clouds here on Earth that have lots of microbes in them. They get into the clouds, they hang out there, then they fall back out and more come in. Maybe life started on the surface of Venus and then rose up into the air and now it's staying up there.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A thousand to one odds. Yeah. I think it's, let me put it this way. I think, you know, on a planet by planet, moon by moon basis, it's very unlikely that there's life out there, but there's so many planets and moons in even our galaxy that I'm sure that there is life of some form elsewhere, whether it's right next door in our solar system.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine drilling down through the ice and sending a probe into a huge ocean. What is that world like? It might have life in it. Or at the very least, it might have some really interesting chemistry. Maybe these are places where life has yet to form. So I can't say whether there's life there or not, but there's certainly good reason to think that there might be life there. And if there isn't, that might be a place to kind of get some clues about how life begins on places like our own planet.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in my book, Life's Edge, I was writing about kind of, you know, how far we can push our concepts of life and can we think about life elsewhere? I certainly think that the icy moons of the outer solar system are the most interesting place to look for life. Mars, that's great, that's fine. I wish them well as they're digging through the dust and the dirt. But imagine...”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we need to be studying this absolutely. There's no question. I mean, you know, in my book, I'm really focused on living things in the air. We have put lots of other things into the air. And so microplastics are a new addition to air pollution. But even just, you know, good old particulate matter from cars and power plants and so on kills several million people around the world every year. It's a major attack on human health. So yes, microplastics, I think certainly bear more research, not just in the air, but in our water, everywhere.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Became sort of a fight against an enemy attack. And so you literally, you had people, the same people who were building a lot of our modern public health system were consulting with the army on biological warfare.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To develop this biological war machine. And he was appalled after the war. And he said the way he described its effect on science, it was the suicide of bacteriology. In other words, he just thought this was a terrible thing for scientists to do instead of trying to look in the air and figure out how to protect lives to develop better and better weapons for killing people, for causing mass starvation and so on. This was true not just in the United States, but in other countries, especially the Soviet Union, where there was this focus on trying to use aerobiology as a new kind of theater of war. It even affects their public health, I would argue. Instead of looking at public health as an opportunity to sort of reform the conditions in which we are in order to promote health and well-being, to some extent public health, especially in the United States,”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do research that could have been really helpful to understanding airborne disease if it hadn't been classified, but it was classified, most of it stayed classified for a very long time. And just it was just sort of almost like a brain drain. And so William Forth Wells, who I mentioned before, who really pioneered the idea that you can get sick from the air around you inside of buildings and so on, he had no idea that a lot of his basic ideas and technology had been”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I argue in the book that the way that aerobiology got turned into biological warfare was quite a tragedy because this was a science that at the time was just getting off the ground. And in fact, the very name aerobiology had been coined in 1937 by a researcher named Fred Meyer who was really kind of emerging. He was going to be, he was really going to lead aerobiology into the modern age and going to turn it into what might have been a really remarkable new science. He died in a plane crash. That's what happens when you're looking for life in the air, unfortunately. And shortly afterwards in World War II, the US military basically started classifying lots of information about how diseases spread through the air. And lots of people came to what was then Camp Dietrich.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and there have been people who have questioned zeroing in on him, people who have sort of come to his defense as someone who wouldn't do something like this. But until there's more evidence, it's really hard to make a theory that would be a responsible one to consider.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The headquarters of this aerobiological germ warfare research since World War II. There was a person who was identified by the FBI who's going to be arrested and he committed suicide before he could be arrested. I think that it's plausible that he was the one. I certainly haven't seen compelling evidence of alternate ideas. But, you know, unfortunately.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the first idea was that this was, oh, this must be Al Qaeda and there must be a terrorist attack. This is what we were terrified of. But all those fears and all that terror actually kind of, I think, sort of distracted people. And I took quite a while for the FBI and very scientists to get a better handle on it. And when they looked at the actual anthrax itself, they said, well, this looks actually like, this is not something that was made in some Soviet lab. This looks like it was just here in the good old USFA, specifically at Fort Dietrich, which was kind of...”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I can only go on all of the investigations that went into this at the time, just to refresh people's memories. In the wake of 9-11, when these planes crashed into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, there was a real fear about an airborne disease attack because biological weapons, which are basically weaponized airborne diseases, they had been developed in the United States and elsewhere for decades. And so there were these worries that maybe, you know, Iraq or terrorist organizations had gotten hold of some of these weapons and were going to use them. The first hint that this might have happened was that the envelopes started showing up at news offices and elsewhere with powdered anthrax and people would open it up and it would go into the air and they might inhale it. And in a number of cases, people died.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes you see someone with a helmet on and it's unstrapped, and you're like, well, that's not going to work. So there are a lot of these questions that go into it. And so, yeah, you will certainly see some studies that may not inspire you, but there are, I've looked at a lot of these studies and talked to a lot of experts. And I would say just judging from where we are now, that's the consensus that I described before.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think really fast of ways to stop it. And we have this shortage of surgical masks and N95 respirators. They said, well, just put on a cloth mask. Maybe that will reduce the risk somewhat. And that was a public health measure based on, you know, some small studies from a few years before. But again, there are cloth masks, there are surgical masks, there are N95 masks. There are these sort of masks that are called ductbill masks. And so, you know, When you're asking, does masking work, one of the questions is, well, what kind of masks are we talking about? And, you know, then we're saying, well, you know, how are people using those masks when people say they're using the mask? Are they just, do you see them with their nose hanging out of it? You know, like that's not going to work in the same way that, you know, if someone, you know, if you say, oh, motorcycle helmets will help reduce deaths on the road and the people are just.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are many different aspects to just something as seemingly simple as masking. So part of the question is what kind of masks are we talking about? You know, the Center for Disease Control, when it decided, oh, maybe COVID is spreading through the air and we need.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It incorrectly, it's not going to be as good as if you were to be taking more careful measures. So, you know, there is certainly, I would say, yes, there's certainly a debate that's going on in the community, but certainly, you know, in a number of reviews that have been coming out recently, the consensus is that masks do help.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's been a debate about randomized controlled trials for something like masks. And so certainly there are some experts who say like you can only judge this based on randomized controlled trials. But there are other experts who say, well, that's a bit like saying we need to randomize controlled trial to show that hard hats work. You know, the physics shows you how it works. Now, do people need to use these things carefully? Yeah, definitely. But you can actually show you can study the way that these masks trap particles and so on to show that you're just going to breathe less virus-laden air. And also randomized control trials themselves, they can be very effective in many different settings, but they're not perfect. And so, you know, if you run a clinical trial with, you know, poor study design, or if you analyze.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it worked in the sense that there are a number of studies that show that different situations when masking policies were put in place, along with other measures, you would see a reduction in risk. And...”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The carbon dioxide level will go way back up again because they turn the filter system off and you're taxing around on the tarmac and waiting to get out. So certainly it's something to bear in mind when you're taking a plane if you're going to decide whether to wear a mask or not. And that doesn't mean that your risk is zero when you're way up in the air and the system is running full strength.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've talked to a few physicists and air quality experts. And yeah, they generally agree that most planes have really good ventilation systems and filtration systems on board. So certainly if there's somebody with an airborne disease like COVID on your flight, basic physics is going to dictate that when you're flying and that system is actually running, your risk is going to be lower because they're going to pull pathogens out of the air. On the other hand, when you're boarding and those systems aren't on yet. And so, and lots of people are breathing in a small space, and they don't even have to cough. I mean, people can just exhale, talk, and they might be releasing tiny droplets that float around. It can float through the whole cabin. That's an issue. And then also, if you were to take one of these carbon dioxide meters on a plane, I own one, if you take one on a plane and you'll notice when you land that.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people talk about sort of the safe level of carbon dioxide in a room, sometimes people put it around thousand parts per million. They call it the Petencoffer number. So he lives on. And yet, you know, he was also incredibly wrong about a fundamental fact about airborne infection. You know, science just doesn't follow a neat path the way we'd like. And in a way, that's one of the things that makes us so interesting to write about.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it is an amazing history, and it really, you really scratch your head. And I think one of the most amazing things about that realization is that it was made by a German hygiene scientist named Max von Pettenkoffer. And von Pettencoffer himself was actually a huge champion of the idea of miasmas. And he believed that cholera and typhoid and all these other diseases were caused by gases that came out of the ground. He had no tolerance for this idea that you were actually ingesting bacteria. He just thought that was ridiculous. He even swallowed a whole tube of cholera once to prove that cholera was not caused by waterborne bacteria. He was that serious. He didn't feel very well, but he survived and he decided that proved his case. Great discovery about carbon dioxide. In fact, it was such a great discovery that”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there are actually schools that are already doing this. It's a very patchwork thing, but if you look at places like Denver and Boston, they are using combinations of these technologies. So they are improving the ventilation, they're putting in filters, they're sometimes putting air purifiers in individual classrooms. And also, most importantly, they're finding ways to see how healthy the air is. The simplest way to do that actually is just to measure the level of carbon dioxide in the air. This is something that actually people figured out in the mid-1800s as I write about in the book. Because if you are sitting there and you're talking to me and you're exhaling, you are, you know, filling the room you're in with carbon dioxide. And if you don't have a window open, it's just going to keep building up gradually.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be brought to the table. And this is an area of new research too. The US government has $150 million project underway to develop cutting-edge new sensors that would basically be able to tell you we're detecting flu virus in this building in real time. Those kinds of technologies could then be yet another way to make sure that the air we breathe is safe.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's certainly not the case that ultraviolet light would be the sole trick to protect us from airborne diseases, from new pandemics that travel through the air. But building engineers who have looked into this and have developed ideas have been arguing that you'd have you could put out standards for how clean your indoor air should be, how free of disease. And then you could meet that those standards in a number of different ways. So one way would be ventilation, fresh air. You know, there's plenty of life outdoors, but that life is much more dilute than what you get in poorly ventilated indoor places. So there are lots of ways to bring fresh air into indoor spaces. And, you know, there are air purification systems, there are filters and so on. There are lots of different things that can”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In certain places to make it possible to just go about our business and relax because the air around us is being disinfected. There still needs to be more research to figure out how do you use these lights to safely protect large volumes of air. You want to make sure that the ultraviolet radiation is in itself like creating any harmful compounds in the air that you might breathe and that might be a problem. But these are all things that could be addressed. And so ultraviolet light could definitely be a part of a real serious approach to keeping indoor air safe.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could be really quite large. I mean, I haven't seen economic calculations of that. But as I write in airborne in the book, the idea that you could safeguard the air with ultraviolet light is not new. And in fact, William and Mildred Wells were demonstrating it in the 1930s. They actually put ultraviolet lamps up in a couple schools in the Philadelphia area and protected the children there from measles outbreaks. And they did all sorts of other experiments to at least show that there was a potential promise there. You know, ultraviolet lamps could potentially really help.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Along with that, there's the scientific question of whether these things are airborne or not. You mentioned measles, for example. It really wasn't until the 1970s that people really agreed that measles are airborne, even though it's incredibly airborne. It's the most contagious disease that we know of. COVID might be in the same ballpark now, but it took a long time for people to amass the evidence to really persuade the community.”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think public health is just a really challenging line of work because you want to reduce death and disease by coming up with measures that are going to apply across the board to the public. And that depends on what you understand about the disease you are trying to deal with. And then when you're dealing with diseases where we don't know that much about it yet, you're in a very tricky situation. Do you go extremely cautious, you know, and say like this could spread in any different way and we have to completely silo ourselves off? Or do you say like, well, we're not, we don't have clear evidence that it's airborne, so you don't have to worry about that. Where do you draw the line? Public health policy is a hugely difficult and contentious area. It's been since the Start of public health. Now,”
2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source