YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Zimmer

lines on the record
56
first
2025-03-05
most recent
2025-03-05
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Put forward by people who we've long forgotten about, people like William Firthwells and his wife Mildred Wells, other people were looking at the results and being like, I don't know. I'm not going to accept that. There was a consensus and then that consensus became established as part of public health policy. And it's also true that if you acknowledge that a disease is airborne and you really want to deal with it seriously, it's going to take a lot to really address it. I mean, if something is just spreading by dry droplets on surface and so on, you know, you can tell people, just wash your hands, disinfect surfaces, and you'll be fine. But it's quite something else when indoor air is starting to become rife with these pathogens that we are exhaling into it.”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And that it took quite a while for the World Health Organization and the CDC to really just say out loud, COVID is airborne. Now, laid out in documents online. Like that is generally accepted that airborne transmission is a really important way that COVID spreads and it does a really good job that way. And so that led me down this path to try to understand why it is that there was this inertia. And I think it goes way, way back. And it goes back to these battles I was talking about over the germ theory of disease and the way that airborne transmission by the early 1900s was really being seen as something that was just not significant, not something to worry about. And so even when evidence, strong evidence, was being”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “That was, in a way, one of the entry points for me into writing this book. Because during the pandemic and the outset in 2020, a lot of reporters, like myself, we were scrambling to write about this entirely new disease. And we were talking with scientists who themselves were scrambling to make sense of this new virus on the scene. And so there were lots of questions. It seemed really peculiar that there was this big conflict that broke out about how COVID spread.”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It did break through, yes. And I think part of the issue is sort of the structure of science. So when I'm telling you about this story about this British doctor who's flying kites trying to catch pollen grains, it's just one guy. It's just one person who's really miserable with hay fever, who's trying to understand it for himself. And, you know, science really works by numbers. Like you actually have to study lots and lots and lots of people. And then if you're going to try to tie people's symptoms to the environment in some way, well, you're going to actually have to track them over months, years, and so on because the environment is changing all the time. You know, everybody who suffers from hay fever will tell you like, well, I don't know. For some reason, this spring, it's not so bad. I don't know why. That doesn't mean they don't have hay fever. It just means that the environment that's causing the hay fever is changing a lot. So there are some...”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think great ideas can just sit around for a long time waiting to be discovered. And I don't think that's unique to airborne disease. I think that's really true across the board for a lot of different sciences. I mean, certainly, you know, a lot of historians of science have said, Charles Darwin, brilliant guy, but really like the evidence was there for a long time. Someone else should have figured this out first. But at least they're there.”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And making you feel miserable makes your nose run and makes you cough and gives you all the symptoms of an allergy. And so, you know, Blackley himself never really got to see that he was actually right, but it wasn't that he was getting sick. It was in a way that his own body was mounting this incorrect defense called an allergy.”

    2025-03-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source