#69 - Carl Zimmer: Airborne - The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe

Carl Zimmer, columnist for the New York Times and acclaimed science writer, discusses his new book "Airborne" which explores the fascinating yet troubling history of how we understand disease transmission through air.

• Pandemic debates about COVID transmission revealed historical patterns of resistance to airborne disease theories
• William and Mildred Wells discovered in the 1930s-40s that diseases float in air droplets for hours but were largely forgotten by history
• The Wellses demonstrated UV light could effectively disinfect air and prevent disease transmission in classrooms
• Fred Meyer, who coined "aerobiology," pioneered research collecting microbes from airplanes and stratospheric balloons in the 1930s
• After WWII, much aerobiology research was classified and redirected into biological weapons programs
• Despite COVID raising awareness, momentum for improving indoor air quality standards is already fading
• Historical documents of scientific work are increasingly vulnerable as government webpages disappear or change
• Psychological barriers may explain our reluctance to accept that air can transmit disease

Carl Zimmer LinkedIn

Carl Zimmer 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Carl Zimmer and Airborne
• 17:26 Down the Rabbit Hole of Airborne Science
• 30:46 Storytelling in Science Writing
• 45:20 The Wells: Brilliant but Difficult Pioneers
• 1:01:00 The Engineering Genius of William Wells
• 1:15:04 Weaponization and the Military Complex
• 1:26:28 COVID-19 and Lessons Not Learned
• 1:31:46 Life in the Air and Meyer's Discoveries

Transcript

simon: 0:00

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. We already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Carl Zimmer, columnist for the New York Times, science writer and author of a new book on the hidden history of the air we breathe called Airborne. There is a fascinating story to be told here in how we a bring science to life with stories and good communication, the process of telling the history of science and the balance of building in the characters without diluting the fact, and b to the stories of the pages within the book itself of key figures in airborne science over the last two centuries and the lost decades to a critical part of public health that has come to bear so dramatically on us over and over again, from influenza to COVID. So it was my great pleasure to have Carl on to talk about all of this and more. He is a prolific science writer, an author of numerous acclaimed books that explore biology, evolution, heredity, neuroscience and the living world, and his latest book, Airborne, is a must read for anyone interested in this part of our world. I really hope you enjoy this. Please don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.

simon: 1:49

This is a conversation with Carl Zimmer. I guess I'm fundamentally fascinated how a science writer like yourself and an experienced one arrives at a point where you go there's a book in this that you know because you must be. It must be inbound amounts of information coming and you imagine you've got quite a broad spectrum of interests. At some point you must have got to this point when you went. There's a story to tell here. How did you get there? I suppose that's the first question. What was the thing that kicked this whole thing off?

Carl: 2:33

I would say that starting on books is like going down rabbit holes, and so you have to realize that you're in a rabbit hole and that it's going quite deep before you should consider writing a book. A book is a big project. It's going to take a long time, it could take a couple years. It's going to be something that you need to be really obsessed about and fascinated by to keep going, obsessed about and fascinated by to keep going. And so, in this particular case, you know, I was on a team of science writers at the New York Times covering the pandemic, and you know so we were all covering lots of different dimensions of the scientific research on a disease that never existed before, and so there was a lot to learn and there were a lot of surprises, and honestly, I think the biggest surprise for me was that there was such a big argument over how COVID spread. I naively assumed that that would be one of the easier things for scientists to understand and to work out, and instead there was just constant battling debates, sometimes literal screaming matches, and then took a very long time for official public health organizations to explicitly say yes, covid is airborne, and I just thought this is really strange. I don't understand this.

Carl: 4:20

I'd like to understand it better, and so I started to talk to some of the scientists who had, you know, led the charge to explore whether COVID is airborne, and they said well, what you got to understand is that this did not start in 2020 with the COVID pandemic. There's a long history here, so you need to get to know people like William and Mildred Wells. And I said who, and so that that led me down this road into history, which just got more and more interesting the more I explored it, and so eventually it sort of my little book sensors went off and I said I think I think this is my next book little book sensors went off and I said I think I think this is my next book.

simon: 5:07

That's really interesting. So do you have any number of these kind of rabbit holes you're scratching around at any one time and then it reaches a kind of a threshold. Does it eventually where you're in? You're in as far as your feet and you're going. I think there's a book here somehow.

Carl: 5:24

Yeah, you know, I'm always open to the possibility of a book, but I'm not one of those people who, like, always has the next book going or has three or four books going. I mean, I know people like that and they're amazing. But you know, right now, for example, I know people like that and they're amazing, but, um, you know, right now, for example, I don't have any idea for a book, Um, and that's fine, I mean, I'll just, I will spend some time, you know, now that this book Airborne is out, um, just looking around and thinking. And you know, I've written 15 books. So, you know, I, I hope to write a few more Um, and you know, I, I, I hope to write a few more Um, and you know, I, I want them to be, I want them to be different. You know, I, I, what's really important to me is to, to, to move on to something uh, separate, Um.

Carl: 6:18

And so, you know, um, earlier in my career, you know, I'd written a book, a big book about evolution, and then I was like, okay, I want to shift. And so I started thinking about the brain, because I've been doing some articles on the brain and I just sort of wondered when did we develop this idea that the brain is where our thoughts are, and that let me down. You know another rabbit hole, Um, and I discovered people that really hadn't been written about before, and in the 17th century in britain, and that led to a book called soul made flesh. So you know, there there is a book. 16 is out there somewhere. I don't know what it is yet and I.

simon: 6:58

I suppose you did the. Was it the world of viruses? I can't remember the exact title planet of viruses planet of viruses. That's right. So you you had some history in viruses and bacteria and that kind of potential for it, so I'm guessing there was some knowledge there already. Some of the stuff that you were looking at made some sense to you from the previous book sure so.

Carl: 7:21

So in 2020, when I first started hearing about COVID, this was in January, and there were emergent diseases, um, about viruses, about parasites, about all the rest of it all, um, I've written a book a planet of viruses. I've written a number of articles for the New York times and elsewhere, and, um, you know, uh, and so I would talk with, you know, colleagues who've also written a lot about emerging diseases and we'd say, huh, it's a coronavirus. That's not good, because we knew that coronaviruses had already spilled over from animals twice in the previous 20 years for SARS and MERS and in both cases it was extremely deadly. So, you know, it wasn't a good feeling. And then it took a little while to sort of get to understand. Like, okay, this is something that has a lower mortality rate than SARS or MERS, but it was spreading.

simon: 9:02

Clearly, it could spread easily because the entire city of Wuhan shut down just in the vain hope of stopping this thing. It didn't. So by February I was telling my friends have you been hearing about this thing in China? You need to be getting ready. You need to get ready for severe disruption. Yeah, interesting, and I mean for those who haven't read the book airborne.

simon: 9:08

There are several parts to it, but a predominant chunk of the book is historical. Is the journey of the journey of how we got here to modern science, really? But there's also a good third of the book, I'd say, dedicated to the more recent history, certainly since kind of the Gulf War and onwards and some of the politics that came into play around the pandemic. Was that kind of where your head started in that part? Was that what you thought you were going to be writing about? And the history kind of came to the fore. Or, as you said earlier, people were already pointing you at the very beginning and going, look, there's a long story here that goes way back, and so did you find you just yourself just tracking back and back and back trying to answer that. How did we end up where we are?

Carl: 9:57

type question yeah, yeah, I mean, whenever you're writing about history, I mean this is a challenge, you know, uh, how, how far do you go to try to answer your questions about why things are the way they are today? Um, and certainly, um, from the outset, like I knew that I had to do some historical research because, you know, I I was being pointed to William and Mildred Wells, who were this American husband and wife team who figured out a lot of the basics of airborne infection in the 1930s and 40s. They worked it out and then were forgotten, and so I knew that the book was going to have to draw connections at least to them, and so I did a lot of archival research to understand who they were, because there's no biographies of them, there's very little about them in terms of biography, there's very little about them in terms of biography. And along the way, I just started discovering lots of other people and so, and really fascinating people and people in incredible conflicts and, you know, battling over the nature of the air, the nature of disease, all of these profound questions.

Carl: 11:32

So, yeah, and after a while, you know, you sort of realize like, oh well, really, you know, even if you limit yourself just to sort of Western thought. You should probably go back 2,500 years, because, because for so long we were dominated by this idea of miasmas that the air itself would be corrupted and that that would cause diseases like malaria, like plague, like influenza. And you know how did miasmas hold sway for so long? And then how did they suddenly collapse? And then how did that connect to our sort of rediscovery of airborne infection today? So there's just all sorts of fascinating connections the more you look.

simon: 12:23

And how do you weave in a story into all of that? Because I I guess there's the scientific part of your brain that's trying to understand the understanding of the time or how that developed over time and put that into context. So there's this, the right brain side of this, but that you've also got a. You've also got to bring a story to life somehow in these books, otherwise they just turn into a textbook and just not going to capture people's imagination. That must be a real skill to to do that, do you find the story finds itself in the narrative and and by stitching it together, or do you have to really go and construct that story and and when you can? If you have to construct stories, how do you find the balance between making it engaging and accurate, certainly scientifically accurate?

Carl: 13:21

well, that's certainly you know. You're certain you've certainly identified, you know, one of the main tasks in science writing. You just you're constantly asking yourself like, am I getting across, you know, crucial concepts? Am I doing it in an engaging way? But you know, the fact is that textbooks or scientific papers, they're both very specialized and kind of, I feel like I want to say, artificial kinds of communication. Kinds of communication. You know, there's a reason that textbooks are the way they are. There's a reason why scientific papers are the way they are. But that's not really how we talk or think.

Carl: 14:16

And I'm including scientists themselves. So you know, if I'm just writing a newspaper article for the New York Times about, you know, some recent study, I'm not going to be sort of quoting from the paper verbatim. I will call up scientists and say so, where did the idea for this research come from? You know, why did you decide to go to this marsh and look for some particular life form, or where did this idea come from? And then the scientists themselves start telling you their story. Then you might call up other people who are sort of involved in the field and they'll tell you maybe a different story. And then you have to start to understand what the real story is. But you know, it's all storytelling.

Carl: 15:02

Now the challenge writing about. So you know, for Airborne, I could certainly talk to people who were involved in the battles over COVID and whether it's Airborne because they lived through it, they fought it. But then you have the Wellses. The Wellses you know died. You know, mildred Welles died in 1957, william died in 1963. I'm not going to be interviewing them. Fortunately they left behind a fair amount of documents, memos, letters and so on in archives and lots of other people had lots of things to say about them in their own letters and documents and so on in archives. And lots of other people had lots of things to say about them in their own letters and documents and so on. So you know, once you start sifting through these things and finding those stories written down, then you can piece them together and you know, some people have more interesting lives than others and William and Mildred Wells had very interesting lives, fortunately you don't get the funding, no matter what part of history you're in, unless you've got a good story to tell and you're known.

simon: 16:27

You know if you're a shrinking violet in some lab in the back of some dusty university, you know you're never going to make it into a book, unfortunately. You know, or be very lucky to, so I guess there were some real characters interwoven through that story.

Carl: 16:44

Sure, sure, yeah, louis Pasteur, for example. There were some real characters interwoven through that, that story. And sure, sure, yeah, louis pastor, for example. Uh, comes to mind. Um, you know, this is back in 1860.

Carl: 16:53

Um, he, he was really the first person to capture micro organ, microorganisms in the air. Um, and this was a crazy idea to people at the time. They just said this is too fantastic, they couldn't believe it. And so he went on these amazing journeys, you know, up glaciers and all over the place with these flasks that he used to catch germs. But that wasn't enough.

Carl: 17:26

You know what he then did is he came back to Paris with all of his flasks and then, you know, presented them to the Academy there but then also put on a big public lecture, a real spectacle, I mean, you know, a sort of a TED talk for 1860, with, you know, projections and turning the lights on and off and making these, these huge declarations. I mean he was a real performer and that helped that actually like that, that, you know that helped to get Louis Pasteur, you know, because, to become almost a secular saint in France and to be a household name today. William and Mildred Wells were not so good at that performance, unfortunately. So I think that was part of the reason they got forgotten.

simon: 18:19

Yeah, but resurrected in many ways by Riley later on. So I mean, most of my listeners will know the Welles' and the Riley's from the Welles-Riley method because it was a formula that was floating around ad nauseum during the pandemic. You know, most of us have no idea of the history that was embedded in that Welles-Riley method.

Carl: 18:44

So yeah, that's, I think yes, and I think it's what. One thing that was interesting is realizing that a lot of people actually think it's the wrong riley, um, uh, because, uh, richard, uh riley, uh johns hopkins, uh Riley, johns Hopkins professor and a former student assistant of Wells. You know, really it did help Wells a lot in. You know, they ran Wells' final experiment to demonstrate that tuberculosis is airborne, I mean, and Wells died during the process. And then, you know, riley was left to try to, you know, carry on the spirit of Wells, basically by himself in the 1960s.

Carl: 19:27

But it was actually his brother, ed, who Ed Riley, who had retired, you know, in the 1970s, and thought back to his own experience as an assistant with William Wells and thought, huh, let me, let me revisit that. And thought, huh, let me revisit that. And there happened to be a measles outbreak in New York State near where Ed Riley lived, and he went and investigated it and developed an equation. And then it was really fun to find a letter that Richard Riley wrote to his brother saying hey know, now that we got your paper published, um, I hear that, you know, engineers are calling this the wells riley equation. So, you know, congratulations, and and ed riley was really was just very happy that he, his name, was now connected with his mentor, william wells, um and it. They still are connected today, but it's not richard riley, so just interesting, clear.

simon: 20:27

Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, most people would assume, including myself. Um, do you think it's get? Do you think it will be? Well, okay, a present tense question.

simon: 20:38

First, was it easier stitching together the story from a long time ago than it was trying to piece together the the present day information for this book? Because there was still politics at play, particularly, I imagine, when you were doing a lot of the research for this? Um, so that, so the first question is that what is the? What's the easier work, in a way, the historical stuff, where you're looking at archives and available information and having to interpret and do the historical stuff, versus the trying to get a meeting with somebody or trying to find documents that are current. And the second part to that question is do you think it's going to get easier or harder as we go into the future to get these archives?

simon: 21:27

Because we know there's a lot of science being rewritten at the moment or deleted Like. I just wonder, in a hundred years time, people looking back to write science history, is it going to be the same game to write science history? Is it going to be the same game? I will that you know. You're not going to uncover letters in the same way that you uncovered with the with the wells is. Are you?

Carl: 21:52

yeah, that that is a great question. Um, yeah, I mean the the old and recent history were both challenging, but in different ways. And you know, at first I was really nervous about what I had gotten myself into, because I was deep into working on a book about people like Richard William and Mildred Wells and I'm like, where am I going to? How am I going to bring these people to life? I mean, yes, they published some papers, and that's fine. And William Wells published one kind of difficult to read book that nobody read. So what do I do?

Carl: 22:40

And so there was a graduate student who had written his thesis about sort of you know, aerobiology in general in the 20th century and he touched on the Wellses and he mentioned that, you know, their work was sponsored by a philanthropy called the Commonwealth Fund. And so I looked around and it turned out, oh, the Commonwealth Fund has archives just a couple hours from where I live over in New York State. And so I said, do you have any William Mildred Wells stuff? And they did a little work and yeah, yeah, we've got some stuff, so come on over and we'll have the boxes out for you. So I got there and sat down and they had pulled, I don't know, maybe 50 document boxes for me. I was like oh wow. And I remember I think it may have been the first thing I pulled out and I put it down and it was sort of a report by someone at this philanthropy about the Wellses.

Carl: 23:52

So this would have been like 1933 or something like that, saying like you know, should we give them money? Well, who are these people? You know, should we give them money? Well, who are these people? Well, and they did, they did basically did this huge investigation of them and of their background and where they were born and how they were educated and what people thought about them and their marriage. And you know, and it's all right there, you know, and someone's saying, well, he can't. You know, william Wells is a terrible teacher. This is something he cannot do, but's he's quite brilliant but very difficult and everybody knows that mildred wells is actually the smarter of the two and and blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's just all right there and I'm like oh, here we go, um, and that's historical like a historical reddit thread.

simon: 24:38

All of us it's coming across. Yeah, this chat about people, right?

Carl: 24:54

in a letter, but you know, but it's on paper, it's on paper and about people in a letter. Covid, you know, a lot of what I was writing about was the way that our understanding and public health messaging shifted as this debate about whether COVID was airborne played out. And a lot of that was being done, you know, in the form of, you know, center for Disease Control webpages or World Health Organization web web pages or press conferences that are posted on YouTube or posts on Twitter. That is all very ephemeral. You know these pages were already disappearing or being revised and so on.

Carl: 25:40

So you know I was making great use of the Wayback Machine. You know the Internet Archive and you know what a wonderful resource and I just hope for future generations of historians that that stays in place. You know it was recently hacked and was down for a while, and was down for a while and it was. It was a terrifying thought because that's, you know, being able to to to find webpages and also to be able to see how those webpages changed over time. That's a big part of our historical knowledge. You know that the COVID pandemic played out online and so if people start deleting pages or or or rewriting them or so on that history could be lost because we're not going to have that many boxes of paper sitting around preserving what happened that meaningfully, but the nuance of it can change and the inferred meaning.

simon: 26:48

I mean we know that's happening right now, for example, in the states quite a bit as organizations shift how they frame certain subjects to keep funding or whatever it is. Um, you lose the sense of time and place, ever so easily. So transient that digital world right.

Carl: 27:04

Well, right now in the united states, we are dealing with uh thousands of web pages on government uh websites disappearing. That's that's what we're dealing with. You know, we are dealing with a, with a massive uh crisis of uh for future historians yeah, yeah and and um we'll mention way back in the show notes here.

simon: 27:27

I think you can donate to them as well. I think um, it's a phenomenally useful organization. Um really is to try and to try and capture stuff for future generations. No, it was only. I was only considering that the other day looking at the news coming out of the states and thinking you know how difficult would it be in a hundred years time trying to look back at the story of the cdc and the language being used and so on and the politics surrounding it, because it chances are, if it wasn't captured by somebody, it's just not going to exist. And everybody's news stream, as we know, is already fairly uniquely configured. So people's sense, perception of what's happening is different from person to person. So it's becoming a very. For someone like yourself, actually, that must be quite worrying as you, as you look into the future about how we tell the stories in future about what's happening today sure, um, you know a lot.

Carl: 28:32

There are lots of uh government documents. You know that um should be archived and then should be available to um public access. And you know it's even hard to get some of those documents that are on paper. One figure in my book is a microbiologist named Theodore Roseberry who was involved in basically turning aerobiology into biological warfare, into creating biological weapons like anthrax bombs and so on, using the principles of people like William and Mildred Wells. And then after the war he regretted what he had been involved in and became a real opponent of the expanding biological weapons program. It was really important in eventually getting it banned.

Carl: 29:30

So the FBI looked at his political activities, his dissent, as obviously showing that he was a communist subversive, and so they just started tailing him and creating a file about him. And I know that there's a file ofversive. And so they just started tailing him and creating a file about him. And I know that there's a file of 1200 pages on him. But when I tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get at it they said oh well, it'll take us 10 years to go through everything and redact any sensitive information. So I just had to shrug and go off to more public, open sources of information, like archives at the National Library of Medicine. So it's always a challenge to find all the information you want to reconstruct history. You know if everybody, if all those communications are by email and people to talk to you about 21 Degrees. A partner of the podcast.

simon: 30:46

Formerly the Green Building Store. They were founded in 1995 by three exceptional building professionals and the company grew out of their frustration with the poor availability of ecological building products, and I've known them for years as the go-to company in the UK for end-to-end design-led MVHR systems. You see, your home should do far more than just provide shelter and be energy efficient. If designed correctly, it'll be a far healthier and more comfortable environment. So whether you just want to start with a single product solution or need a comprehensive range of technologies to make your home more comfortable, 21 degrees can help. In 21 degrees you won't find a more trustworthy, straight-talking, passionate about what they do and approachable group of people. I speak a lot about the performance gap on this podcast and what we can achieve if we value ventilation highly enough. 21 degrees embodies that sentiment for me. So if you're building a home, looking to install ventilation or need to talk to experts in the field, I can't recommend them highly enough. Links are in the show notes at air quality mattersnet and you can find them at 21degreescom. That's 21degreescom.

simon: 32:11

Now back to the podcast. Yeah, no for sure. And then history becomes much harder to tell and you know we should say this isn't a uniquely united states problem. You know, the the molding of reality is happening on every corner of the planet at the moment, so I don't think you know not to cast dispersions in one direction only, although there's clearly been a seismic shift, uh, and the step in that direction in the last few months. Um, what I think what's fascinating to me about your work, carl, is this bringing science to life and telling the story of knowledge.

simon: 33:06

Fundamental reasons I do this podcast is because I'm fortunate that I get to have these amazing conversations with the wellses of the day effectively, and I find their framing and stories and knowledge absolutely fascinating. But it just seems to be held within these silos and doesn't break out. And that's been the eternal struggle of science, hasn't it is to be is to communicate the complex and the frontier stuff in a way that resonates with people and can build momentum and narratives and the kind of things we need science to do so desperately at the moment. Do you see that gap? Is that something, as a writer of science, that you see? And and? And how do we bridge that gap in communications? Do you think in science? Uh, well, I know that's a big question, but yeah, no, no it is.

Carl: 33:59

It is a big question but it's an important one and, um, you know, certainly that's the kind of space that I travel in and have for over 30 years as a professional writer about science. But you know, I also teach, so at Yale I teach writing to undergraduates as well as to graduate science students and you know, when I'm talking to the graduate science students, I'm often having to really zero in on some really basic principles of writing and communication. And you know, the fact is that they really haven't gotten much training in those things before we meet each other. That tells me that, you know, the scientific community doesn't really put much value on that. Because you know much value on that, because you know it should, they should be having more than you know a couple hours with me, like, like, learning how to write and learning how to communicate is just, you know, you shouldn't expect to be able to do it naturally and shouldn't expect to be able to do it after just a couple hours.

Carl: 35:19

Um, it just, it takes work, like lots of other skills take work. It takes work like lots of other skills take work. And so you know, certainly there's plenty of room for improvement in how scientists are trained and that doesn't mean that everybody will become Neil deGrasse, tyson or Brian Cox or one of these. You know, um, scientists who can write books and deliver beautiful lectures and be on talk shows, and it's not like everybody has to be like that. But you know, certainly, um, I think in the united states, you know, a lot of scientists are are really baffled that the government support for science is evaporating in terms of massive erasure of grants. It's happening right now as we speak, and they're just wondering like, well, why don't my fellow scientists and Americans see why this is so important and valuable and cool and all the rest? So clearly they are seeing that there's a big gap in terms of communication. So there's a lot of work to do.

simon: 36:42

Do you think the institutions carry some blame there? I was only talking to someone I talk with quite regularly in one of the big London universities, you know, and they're doing some phenomenal work in the built environment, really cutting edge, exciting stuff. That means stuff real, real tangible outcomes in the real world, bricks and mortar effects, and they've got virtually no communications department in this university to help tell that story. Like you say, I mean scientists themselves and researchers without doubt could learn to better communicate outcomes and results and intentions and framing and stuff of their work. But also they were often within big organizations who would have communication professionals in those organizations who should be telling those stories. It seems to me, much better than they do.

simon: 37:38

I mean some universities do it better than others, don't get me wrong. Um, not that it gets you out of jail. I mean harvard's one of the best uh organizations at telling the story, um, and they're one of the biggest scrutiny at the moment. So I don't think it prevents the the, the whims of politics. But we've got to get back. You know those in those organizations are, seems to me. I've got to get better at telling the story of science that's coming out of those organizations, institutions right.

Carl: 38:08

Well, I, you know. I mean, if let's say that, like, let's say you're in a plane and it's going through a hurricane now, uh, you know, if, if, if the plane's in trouble, like you know, may you, I suppose you can complain about the pilot? Like, oh, the pilot must not be very good. Maybe the pilot is good or not good, but you're also flying through a hurricane, did you get that? Yeah, well, the analogy I'm trying to make there is a hurricane's a hurricane and you can't just pretend that you can solve everything just with the right skill.

Carl: 38:59

You mentioned Harvard. Harvard has a gigantic team of public information officers. They are firing in all cylinders. They reach out to journalists like me, but they also do lots of their own stuff. They get their scientists on to podcasts. They have their own podcast, they guard social media. They're doing everything they can think of. You know, but you know they're in the United States at least. But in the United States at least, we have a culture where a lot of people look at a place like Harvard as being just the enemy for research on things like Alzheimer's and tuberculosis and so many other things. That doesn't necessarily connect, because we're in this environment where a substantial portion of the country has developed. You know just very strong emotional views on a place like harvard, and and so you know you can do. You can send out all the press releases you want.

simon: 40:18

Um, you're still in a hurricane yeah, no, that's true, and probably in a way a bad organization to note because it would be one of the ones in the crosshairs, so much that people will have a perspective of it. Um, but you and I both know there's there's a lot of very good work being done by a lot of very good people in institutions that don't have that reputation, um, and again lost in the wind of comms and communications, of not being able to get those messages out well enough, and maybe that's just the. The challenge of science in general. It's always a. It can be a dry, I mean.

simon: 40:57

I find air quality exciting. I'm, I'm fairly unique. You know most people. It's not a dinner conversation, let's face it. So, um, that's the challenge in science is communicating it, and that, for me, is what you've done so well is is the storytelling, and storytelling is a universal way of communicating. Do you find you're able to use classic storytelling structures in science writing? Can you find the heroes and the challenge and the, the, you know, the enemies and all of those classic kind of ideas of storytelling, and is that something you consciously lean on when you're trying to structure how you get the information out in these books?

Carl: 41:47

yeah, I mean I, you know, I studied literature and in college literature. In college. I do not have a scientific degree. I have learned a lot about science over the years. I've been very lucky to have scientists walk me through things and I've read a lot of papers and a lot of textbooks and so on. But I do feel grateful for having that grounding in understanding how stories work, the different kinds of stories that people tell, the techniques that people use to tell those stories, what you give, what you hold back, how you structure a plot.

Carl: 42:34

You know, of course, when you're doing journalism or writing history, like you are writing stories about things that actually happened, so you cannot make stuff up. And so you know you can't say like, oh, it would be great if this person was the hero. And you know, when you dig in you find, oh, actually he was kind of a jerk stick so closely to one of these story forms that you start distorting the truth and the real history. You know and so, but I find that you would just end up with more interesting stories. So William and Mildred Wells you know the, the scientists who did know about them, uh, not many uh. But those who did know about William Mildred Wells.

Carl: 43:39

Well, mostly they didn't know about Mildred at all and, uh, also like for William, he just seemed like this sort of this, this uncomplicated hero, this, this uncomplicated hero. He was this visionary, he had this great big insight and and if his message dig in through, didn't get through, it wasn't his fault. And that's not true. That's not true at all, you know. You know, the fact is that William was in a only did what he did because he was married to Mildred Wells. She was quite brilliant and kept him focused and moving ahead and together they worked on a lot of stuff and he was terrible at getting his point across. Just people, just, you read these reports and you get the feeling that people were just. You read these reports and you get the feeling that people were just listening to these long wandering harangues and just wishing that they could just jump out a window. It was very difficult for him to connect with people. I think psychologists could have a field day with him. So that's the real story.

simon: 44:49

Yeah, and I was going gonna ask you that. I mean because sometimes real life you shouldn't make it up, even if you wanted to, and and that the stories pop from the people. And that's always a worry for me is that the and we see this in science the people with the biggest charismas or the stories to tell are the ones that get heard, and sometimes there's a battle between that and the real work that's going on, and I understand that. And also, sometimes people could just be assholes as well and they put people off, and you know science is full of them as well. There's no doubt about it.

simon: 45:22

So it's the tapestry of life science, because it's people doing this science and you have that. It's those people that drive the innovation or pull the research monies in or can tell the stories or can communicate it and get it turned into regulations or standards, like it's just, it's an expression of life in general. But but I I was going to ask you, with all that you've read and kind of looked at the Wellses, what is your sense of him, the man at the end of this? Was he the reason why it stalled for so long? Was he just objectionable as an individual? Was he on the spectrum somehow and just poor at communicating. Like, do you get a feeling or a sense of the character of of the man looking?

Carl: 46:19

oh, yeah, yeah, no you definitely get a feeling for the character of the man, and I mean, from the start, people are calling him peculiar. That's the word that keeps coming up again and again and you know, I I feel like you know this is her early 20th century language gives the word peculiar a lot of uh, baggage, uh, you know I, I think that there was a lot that their people were trying to convey when they say, oh yes, william, well, he's peculiar, um and from the I had, I had a peculiar great auntie, you know I think, you know, we, we, that term is loaded with, but these days it it would be given, it would be given a name, you know.

simon: 47:02

But but back then it just kind of carries this baggage, doesn't it? Yeah?

Carl: 47:06

he was. I mean so will. William Wells was an outsider. That's another important thing to bear in mind. You know he was, he had, he had been trained at MIT. You know he got a bachelor's and then later looking at how oysters could become contaminated with diseases because they were taking up water that was tainted with sewage, and he was just sort of doing this stuff and then lost his job in the Great Depression and was desperate to find some work. And he managed to get a very low-paying job at Harvard just teaching a class. And it turned out he was terrible at teaching, he's making no money, he's terrible at teaching, he's barely holding on there.

Carl: 48:04

And you can tell that people are kind of looking at him askance because he doesn't have a PhD and so on and he's peculiar. And so then he and Mildred start to do this research. That really is going very much against the grain. At the time, in the early 1930s, there's just an overwhelming consensus that the air was basically harmless, that patients did not exhale germs that could make you sick. Maybe they might cough in your face, that would be the worst of it but mostly it was due to contact or contaminated water and so on, and so they knew that they were taking on this huge consensus and they were doing so as outsiders. So they were paranoid and, you know, combative and you know, were sort of defending their turf and you know that they got fired from harvard as a result.

simon: 48:59

You know it said what fundamentally drove the outsider status? Was it purely a lack of qualifications? Was it social status in some way? Or was it were they just contrarians in general? Because I know lots of contrarians in science that wouldn't be considered outsiders, and then you know lots of people in science that would be described on the border of kooks. You know the just just. You know bananas, stuff that they're coming up with, um, but this, this kind of outsider terms with them. Do you think it was it just a lack of phd status that made them an outsider, or was it something else?

Carl: 49:45

yeah, it was a lack of phds, a lack of sort of, you know, intimacy with the sort of the way that you know, public health was was studied at the time. Um and um, yeah and just, uh and and um, you know just, and also, on top of all that, um, they just weren't very good at kind of, you know, they just weren't very good at kind of, you know, working their way through the social labyrinth. And so, you know, so you know, people would sort of, you know, keep their distance. And you know, at Harvard, you know, once they actually demonstrated that, lo and behold, viruses and bacteria can float in droplets in the air for hours and, lo and behold, you can knock them out with ultraviolet light.

Carl: 50:34

William Wells' superior, said okay, well, I want the patent on that and I'm taking over your research and we're going to do it all in my lab. And the Wellses got into a fight with him and said no, no, we like, we want to be totally independent. And they didn't have any allies to back them up, and so they were out, you know. So they ended up down and fortunately they had a few admirers down in Philadelphia who got them a place at the University of Pennsylvania them a place at the University of Pennsylvania, but pretty soon they were in the same dysfunctional dynamic where, you know, the very same people who were their big patrons and supporters were having to put up with them, just yelling at them and arguing with them and pushing them away.

Carl: 51:27

They were, you know, their colleagues would write, you know I would read letters. Or they say the wells are their own worst enemies. Um, so so uh they. They were certainly like taking on a big challenge and trying to get the world to recognize that, yes, diseases can be airborne. Um, but they didn't make it any easier on themselves.

simon: 51:52

No sure, and needed a good PR person. I mean it sounded like between the two of them they created this vortex of trouble and interestingly, it struck me, reading back through the book there again a few weeks ago, was that if he hadn't been for the depression he probably still would have been in oysters like he was. He seemed fairly happy from what you could tell from what you were writing, working away in the world of oysters. Isn't it strange?

Carl: 52:23

yeah, no, he was, he was. Uh, yeah, he was, and he was kind of famous because people loved eating oysters. But you'd have these huge lethal outbreaks where people would be dying of typhoid, and he was figuring out how to disinfect oysters. He was even figuring out how to breed them. He figured out how to breed oysters and so he was in the newspapers as the oyster godfather. I mean it was, it was a an amazing thing. He was doing, yeah, and he would, I'm sure he would have been perfectly happy doing that. But then all of a sudden the crash came and everybody was just in desperate straits. Um, and so, yeah, his, his career took this amazing turn.

simon: 53:12

But he seemed to be just one of these innovators and engineers and so, like a good generalist, he seemed to be able to turn his hand to almost anything, not just the theory but the practical, as you say, uh, developing centrifuges, centrifuges which, which, which seemed to go through his career actually to later innovations for separating air, and also when it came to water treatments in the war. He wasn't just a theoretical person, he was a practical person, wasn't he at the heart of it?

Carl: 53:43

Yeah, and from the start that was true, true. So when he was MIT, he actually invented a very early water testing kit. So you could actually be standing by a stream, scoop up the water and put it in a probe and figure out whether there was E coli in the water, whether there was fecal contamination. He invented that as a 20-year-old, so he had this real brilliant engineering skill from the start. And in World War I he was drafted and he joined.

Carl: 54:28

What was called the Sanitary Corps was drafted and he joined what was called the Sanitary Corps. And so there, you know, the mission was to take this new knowledge about the germ theory of disease and water contamination and protect soldiers, and so he did that. He had a truck that he developed and at a military camp he would, you know, take water from a muddy shallow stream that was, I'm sure, contaminated with all sorts of stuff and he would disinfect it and he would give clean, safe water to thousands and thousands of soldiers there and then actually went to the front in France and was delivering safe, clean water to them. You know, in wartime, and unfortunately, wells could see all around him that everybody was dying anyway, but they were dying of influenza and this was something that you couldn't prevent by keeping water clean, like I think there, like maybe the first seeds about airborne disease might have been planted because it haunted him. Afterwards His sister died in the great pandemic.

simon: 55:42

And can you imagine? He must have seen the bodies piling up in the work. I mean influenza in the war. There would have been piles of bodies.

Carl: 55:51

Oh, absolutely, yeah, no, I mean even, yes, you know, at the camp that he was at in Maryland before he was sent over, the flu had already started there. You know they were building extra morgues overnight because so many people were dying, and so, yes, that definitely haunted him. And so when he got to Harvard, I think my theory about what made him click on airborne disease is that his old teacher at MIT, william Sedgwick, had gone over to Harvard to set up their public health school and Sedgwick did this work where he actually he was curious about the air in the late 1800s and he had created a very simple device he called the aerobioscope, which is basically just a sort of vacuum jar and you sort of pop it open and the air rushes in. And then you know, you have some medium there so that if there are bacteria in the air maybe they can grow. And there was a picture of that device in the office that they put Wells and you know Wells writes about seeing it and I'm pretty sure that he looked at that and he said wait a minute, that's not very good Because, like the, you know, if there's life in the air it's going to be very dilute.

Carl: 57:25

But that's, you know, we breathe, you know, thousands of times a day, so we are sampling huge volumes of air, and so it's kind of like oysters in the water that are sampling lots of water because they're filtering for food. So you need to be able to get a much bigger volume of air to kind of get a sense of the risks that it poses. And so then, yeah, so he invented this crazy centrifuge to be able to capture much, much larger volumes of air. And, lo and behold, he started to find lots of things in the air and he could use this centrifuge as a scientific instrument to test his theories about airborne infection. So it was brilliant. And he would go on to invent all sorts of other things. You know, all sorts of devices.

simon: 58:13

He was incredibly clever and where was the passion for uv from? Was that from mildred wells, primarily? Or from himself, do you think? Or were they both? Did they both have a core interest in it?

Carl: 58:28

well, once, once that they were building a theory for airborne infection through these, these floating droplets that would carry germs in them. Um, then, then immediately they started thinking like sanitarians, like like people who are seeing something, a medium that's infected, and how do you disinfect that? And so William, primarily, started going systematically through things that he knew worked in water. So now, some things you won't try, so, like chlorine, for example. Chlorine is great for disinfecting water. You're not going to put chlorine in the air. That's chemical warfare. You're going to kill people. So no chlorine.

Carl: 59:19

Uh, then he said, well, what about ozone? Um, because ozone can disinfect, and ozone was okay in terms of uh attacking these, the airborne germs and his experiments, but it wasn't great. And then it occurred to him that, you know, actually Gordon Fair, his boss at Harvard, had done some studies in the 20s on ultraviolet light to disinfect water, and people knew they could disinfect surfaces too. So he was like, hmm, what about ultraviolet? Let me just try it, let me just let me give it a shot, because, you know, ozone hadn't worked very well. And so he tried it and it worked incredibly well, just like total disinfection. And so that was probably around, I guess, 1933 or 1934, if I recall correctly.

simon: 1:00:07

And so then ultraviolet light became um a real obsession for both mildred and william, um going forward um until their death really yeah, and I I just couldn't help, when I was reading the book, just hearing so many echoes of conversations I'm having today with people right across the spectrum, from very highly respected academics to industry, to policymakers. And there seems to be the same questions being asked 20 years on, 50 years on, 100 years on People questioning the potential for long range exposure to viruses, people questioning the effectiveness of UVC and UV in buildings. You know, still we're still today putting UV in classrooms to try and understand if it's effective or not. Did you find that? Do you find that fascinating? This golden thread that seems to be just repeat on a repeat somehow, and I just felt, reading your book, I've been having almost identical conversations that the wells is we're having in the mid the last century.

Carl: 1:01:39

It's bizarre to me it really is bizarre and and it came as a surprise to me and it I've been thinking about it a lot. And so, for example, the ultraviolet light that you mentioned yeah, there's lots of research now on particular kinds of ultraviolet light that might be particularly effective and safe for, you know, keeping indoor spaces disaffected and yet disaffected. And yet, you know, about 90 years ago, the Wellses were working that all out. In 1940, when they went to Philadelphia, they actually were able to install ultraviolet lamps in classrooms in a school in Philadelphia and a measles epidemic swept through the city like the biggest measles epidemic they had ever seen, and they were able to clearly demonstrate that the kids in those classrooms where there were ultraviolet lamps pointed up to the ceiling were like 10 times less likely to get measles. I mean it just it was a really big, powerful effect. And this was not something that they kept a secret.

Carl: 1:03:02

There were lots of newspaper articles, you know, profiles in Time magazine, all sorts of coverage, and people were really excited. They were saying, oh, wow, it coverage. And people were really excited. They were saying, oh, wow, it turns out that these diseases are airborne and that, you know, these UV rays can free the air of germs, you know, and that reporters would talk about a future in which you would just have these fixtures in public spaces and that we would be protected, you know, from. You know that 1918 flu pandemic that haunted wells and everybody else Like maybe there wouldn't be another one because thanks to UV light. I mean, this was all public discussion and yet it disappeared. And today, in a lot of ways, we're back into this discussion with amnesia. People are saying what? Really? That doesn't make sense to me. No, there's no evidence for this. The fact is that for almost a century there has been at least basic evidence. There's still lots of research to do on these scores, but, yes, it's very strange.

simon: 1:04:25

Anybody who thinks that things that are happening now are happening for the first time, you need to look back in history, like these are. These are discussions that we've been having for a long time. Um, but it seems, even even at a more fundamental level than that there's this seems to be this deep rooted reluctance to accept that the air can do us harm. Somehow We've kind of understood it from an air pollution perspective, although you could argue we haven't, that we still need to do far more when it comes to air quality and the impacts on our health in general particulate matters and VOCs and so on but there seems to be this golden thread through history that there seems to be this golden thread through history that there seems to be this deep-rooted reluctance to accept the life in the air that, as you, as you put it, the the life we breathe. Um, and it's, it's odd and I can't quite put my finger on it, and it reminds me a little bit of radon. We seem to have the same problem with radon, like at some psychological level, it's like people don't want to know with radon, we know in areas of high radon I live in ireland and you know we've got prolific levels of radon here. You can't give a test away. You literally can't give them away. And we've had studies where buildings have been identified as having high levels of radon residences and people won't even take free upgrades, free remediation. It's like they just don't want to know at some kind of core level.

simon: 1:06:03

And you wonder if there's a little bit of that with viruses and bacteria and things like that in the air that people just rather not know, bacteria and things like that in the air that people just rather not know. That that's because because my hunch is because breathing is such an instinctive thing to do is something we don't have control over there's some psychological link there that doesn't want to know about something you've got no agency over at an individual level. You know, I often say you know, you cannot like the taste of the water you're drinking and I can choose to wait a couple of hours until I get home and can drink water I like the taste of. We don't get that choice with air. Um, so you wonder if there's something that finds its way all the way up to policy and science, somehow that there's just seemed this deep-rooted reluctance to accept that there's stuff in the air that does us harm somehow. I don't know.

Carl: 1:06:55

Um I, I think that, uh, there is certainly an issue, uh, in the sense that, um, the air is invisible and, and you know, we just think of it as this transparent gas and that's it. Uh, no, you know, if, if there's a wildfire and you're sort of you're straining to breathe, like, then you become aware, like, oh, there can be things in the air and this is probably like dangerous, um, but, um, you know, you don't need a wildfire to get sick. If you're, you know, in a restaurant where somebody has COVID or some other airborne disease, I mean the air can seem perfectly fine but it could be harboring millions of viruses and so, yes, so there is a big, I think there is a big psychological hurdle there.

Carl: 1:08:01

But you know, I mean there was a psychological hurdle about, about water and water purification, I mean you know, before people really came to sort of embrace the fact like, oh yeah, actually, like water can have bacteria and viruses in it and that can make you sick. We should have clean water, you know. So we've incorporated that. We just haven't incorporated airborne infection particularly well yet and it just, it may be just a harder thing for people to absorb psychologically. You know, you, just, you just think then, when you go to professional groups of public health experts and infectious disease folks, you know they are building on their own history, a history that you know, 100 years ago was really very emphatic, that you didn't have to worry about the air. And so they're sort of have a kind of a default of saying like well, you need to prove it to me with an overwhelmingly powerful case, you know, I mean, you know, the fact is that, like you know, people would would say like, oh, you know, influenza is, you know, definitely spread on fomites, little dry droplets on surfaces, and they would say they're with great emphasis. And yet you know there's no randomized clinical trial on fomites. No one's done that. They've just sort of assumed based on what they know about the virus and about our secretions and so on. They've just said like, oh, it stands to reason that it could spread by fomites, so on. They've just said like oh, it stands to reason that it could spread by fomites, so why, you know?

Carl: 1:09:54

And yet then there's a separate standard for demonstrating airborne infection. And this was true for the Wells. I think this was a problem for the Wells is that people were like I don't, you're going to have to, you're going to, you are going to have to work hard to convince me of this. You, this, I will accept these other things, but I'm holding you to a much higher standard of evidence and it was hard to meet that standard of evidence. We still don't have that for influenza. We still don't know really how influenza is spread.

simon: 1:10:25

We don't know, which is crazy. And do you think in more recent history I mean, you touch on it quite a bit in the book certainly from the Second World war onwards, the military industrial complex starts to come to bear this ability to manipulate viruses and bacteria and other things in the air and create biological weapons and so on. A lot of that research was effectively driven into underground for decades, or certainly behind closed doors. Um, so we lost the latter part of the last century, it seems to me in that kind of open science on it, because it had all been taken by the, the, the military industrial complex, as it were, that that saw this as a weaponizable thing. Do you think that's a fair argument, that somehow a lot of that because we certainly saw, you know, the, the research and the was pulled, wasn't it? Literally in the second world war it all turned into weaponization, or or the large parts of it, the protection against that weaponization. It took a very, it took on a very different momentum for half a century?

Carl: 1:11:34

Sure, yeah, it's fascinating to see the origin of it. In World War II, the United States up until then had not really taken biological warfare very seriously as a threat. It just didn't seem like it could do that much damage. Some horses had been exposed to some diseases and that was about it. But in the 1930s William and Mildred Wells had shown how diseases can be airborne and had, you know, developed theories and technology to study it.

Carl: 1:12:19

And you had other people who were flying around in airplanes and finding lots of things you know way high up in the air.

Carl: 1:12:34

You know way high up in the air, including, you know, fungi that could wipe out a wheat farm or, you know, cause potato blight and destroy a potato farm. And so and I write about these people in the book and I also write about how you know in World War II the military said so, you know, in World War II the military said brought together scientists and secretly said you know, can we make biological weapons? And they said you know what we can. And what we can do is we can take all this aerobiology work and just put it behind a wall at this place called Camp Dietrich, and we'll build a big aerobiology building and we will test these things out. Camp Dietrich, and we'll build a big aerobiology building and we will test these things out. So instead, whereas the Wellses were trying to figure out how to protect children from measles, the military was saying how can we build weapons that will act like airborne diseases on an incredible scale and to wipe out battalions on the battlefield?

simon: 1:13:32

Or even food supply chains. Like you say, rust and potato blights. It wasn't just even directed at humans. Like can we disrupt an entire population's food supply with these weapons?

Carl: 1:13:45

Yeah, and some of these aerobiologists were thinking even further. They said, okay, well, japan is, you know, has you know, lots of military vehicles. They have wheels, the wheels have tires. The tires are made of rubber. Where's the rubber coming? The air to wipe out the rubber plantations and suddenly they're not going to have tires for their armies.

Carl: 1:14:19

So you know, this was all being experimented on and then after World War II, it didn't stop. It actually ramped up in the United States to incredible levels. It actually ramped up in the United States to incredible levels, just creating vast arsenals of you know, those rust spores that you mentioned, of anthrax, of tularemia, but sort of stand in bacteria, in spraying them into San Francisco from offshore or spraying them in the New York city subways and so on. So it was a very active field and it was all primarily classified. And so Soviet Union was doing even more, and so you have so much energy and work going into aerobiology.

Carl: 1:15:16

But it is all classified, it is all secret. All those insights that might actually help us to understand diseases were just hidden. And so I do think that it was a real hidden, and so I do think that it was a real. You know air biology, you know, I sort of came to feel like it was kind of a it's been kind of a cursed science, you know it's really struggled to get off the ground and and really come into its own and I think I think the biological warfare episode was one of the biggest curses it had and I think you reflect that in your book.

simon: 1:15:53

I can't remember the individual you were talking about, but they came out of that period with a lot of insight and really struggled to present that insight in a way that wasn't going to be redacted, even with, even with the blessing of the government of the time. They they were limited in what they could say. Yeah, because Official Secrets acts.

Carl: 1:16:13

Yeah, this is Theodore Roseberry. He was a microbiologist at Columbia who ended up in charge of a lot of the air biology, biological weapons programs at Camp Dietrich and then came out and within a couple years was starting to think oh, this is not good. We are in this sort of endless war with nuclear weapons and biological weapons on a bigger and bigger scale, and he wanted to warn the public, but he knew that if he started sharing classified information he would end up in jail. So he danced this very delicate dance to pull the scraps of public information and to tell a story, to tell the story of this danger. And so he became really the most prominent uh speaker about biological weapons. Who actually had worked on biological weapons um no, no, everybody else was too scared to talk was there a?

simon: 1:17:24

was there a part of this book that kind of wrote itself for you? I mean, what was the most enjoyable part of this was was there? Were there individuals or stories that just seemed to pop for you and you really enjoyed bringing to life?

Carl: 1:17:45

I'd say you know, one of the most uh fun parts was discovering the work of a plant pathologist named Fred Meyer. Fred Meyer who died in 1938, he actually coined the word aerobiology. He was arguably the first aerobiologist and he just had a tremendous amount of fun looking for life in the sky. He would fly around in airplanes or in dirigibles in the 30s and then he would find out about amazing voyages other people were taking, like Charles and Lynn Burke or Amelia Earhart. And then there was this amazing set of voyages that people took up into the stratosphere and he would give them probes to look for life up there. And yeah, it was all just incredible and remarkable it's. It's really interesting.

Carl: 1:18:49

You know how just just him establishing that you know their life can indeed survive in the stratosphere just blew people's minds and you can see how the world started to think like, whoa, wait, so how high can life go? Could life go into outer space and other planets? Like what you can tell? People are just starting to think about these things in the 1930s, and that was. That was a lot of fun, especially when you then pair that with what aerobiologists are doing today in terms of really documenting the life in the air, what they call the aerobiome. Now they have really sophisticated samplers and they can sequence the DNA or the RNA of things that are in a cloud, and so they can drill down into the real diversity of the life that is all around us and that we breathe all the time. So, yeah, that was a really enjoyable part.

simon: 1:19:45

Yeah, these were parachuting scientists on balloons that were collapsing as they were coming down from the stratosphere and, like you could write, you could make it up, it was a, it was a like that was a very fun part of the book and and you know how did you uncover that? The? This stuff was going on the um on the planes I can't remember the, the, the two people now that traveled around the world on their planes and, um, he was sneaking um air quality. He was sneaking vials, skyhooks onto their planes and yeah, they went missing and he was blamed for accidents and you know, they went, went up in balloons phenomenal guy. Now there's a guy that got funding and managed to convince people for his ventures, so I'm guessing he was a great communicator that got people bought into what he was doing.

Carl: 1:20:38

Yeah, so, yeah, so, so, um, uh, yes, so uh, fred Meyer, um, he, he, uh, he was, he was a real charmer. You can tell that he just knew how to talk people into working with him. And so somehow, you know, he managed to reach out to Charles and Lynn Lindbergh, who at the time were the most famous people in the world. They would get tens of thousands of letters a year just from anybody. And somehow he was able to reach out to them and persuade them to help design an instrument that they could bolt to the plane and take with them when they flew over Greenland to Europe, over the North Atlantic. And you know, when Meyer then, you know, wrote up the results, he shared it with newspapers and so on. So there was a huge amount of news and it was, you know, it was not, again, not a secret.

Carl: 1:21:44

I mean, here's someone, fred Meyer, who we've never heard of and yet, like in the 1930s, he was doing incredible things and was making a real sensation. And you know, the irony is that for years his bosses at the US Department of Agriculture said you have to do this in your off hours. This is crazy stuff and we're not supporting this at all at all. But eventually, once he was able to get the Lindberghs involved and find life in the stratosphere, he was able to persuade them, say okay, we'll support you. And not only did they support him, they actually, meyer, set up a whole government research center for aerobiology in 1937. This would have been kind of like the national weather service, but for life, uh it was. The plans were incredibly amazing and unfortunately, fred meyer uh died tragically looking looking for life in the air not long after that and the whole thing fell apart. So again, this is part of the curse of aerobiology yeah, and what?

simon: 1:22:51

what's your sense of, what's your sense of the recent history, what, what along with your book? But in years to come, what do you think will be the story of the, the pandemic and some of the instances before that and interactions with the likes of the who and the cdc and the politics that surrounded it all? Like, can you kind of project in your mind's eye out that far? I mean? I know you've tried, you've covered it, but it's so recent, I mean, because I imagine when you were doing the research, that we were still had a hangover really from from covid. Um, can you kind of project out 20 or 50 years, like having written what you've written about the last century? What's your kind of thoughts on how we'll look at how we dealt with this and whether we learned the lessons, and do you still think it's a cursed science?

Carl: 1:23:54

Um, I, I, I have to say that, you know, in the five years since the COVID pandemic started, uh, on the one hand we, we, we did have this growing understanding that COVID is airborne and that to deal with an airborne disease you have to take some steps that you wouldn't for a disease to spread a different way. These concepts of the wells and others have really started to take hold. But then the question is okay, well, what do you actually do to keep people safe? How do you protect people from the diseases today that are airborne, and how do you prepare for the next pandemic, which might very well be airborne? It seems like being airborne makes things very good as pandemics and I sort of feel like my view is that the momentum is going away and that push is slowing down. You know, I'm not aware of any countries that now actually have real mandates with teeth for indoor air quality standards to deal with reducing infection.

Carl: 1:25:35

There are, you know, scientists are putting out suggestions like here's what you might do, but it's really, you know, it's on a case-by-case, building-by-building, school-by-school basis. We don't do that with water. You don't go and buy a house and say like, oh, by the way, do you do anything to make sure you don't get cholera or typhoid in your water. You don't say that because it's like your city ought to be taking care of the water. That's an expectation we have. That doesn't always happen, but when it doesn't happen it's an outrage.

Carl: 1:26:23

So, yeah, and also, you know there's lots of research left to do. You know, with UV light, for example, like there are lots of questions about how well UV light can work and are there dangers to it, are there side effects of, you know, just creating air pollution by having UV going all the time in poorly ventilated spaces. Those are important questions and there should be a lot of research to address those, to address a technology that you know, we've known can work for 90 years and yet still it's fairly small groups that are doing the research on that, the research on influenza still just a few small groups who don't have a lot of funding. Honestly, I'm not that optimistic about where we'll be in 50 years.

simon: 1:27:13

I can very much see us going into another one of these cycles yeah, yeah, it's interesting you say that and now it's even worse than the uvc. I mean, we still don't really have proper filter standards in europe, for example, so that you can understand the category of air cleaner that you're getting. If you want to, if that was your choice of the, this de-risking of space and never mind uv, and, like you say, there's good work coming. I've got some people coming on the podcast shortly that have got some really fascinating work on far uvc, you know, and it's impacts look like they're really positive, um, but but I think I think this microbiome question, it it's. It seems to me to be a little analogous to sustainability. It's such a nuanced and complex area that the science is never going to finish on it. So if you're looking for a black and white this is the answer type scenario probably doesn't exist. You know, we don't know what a good level of bacteria and viruses is in a space. You know, I think everybody accepts that having completely sanitized spaces is not good for anybody. So at some point there's a line somewhere that exists where there's a healthy environment, where you're exposed to enough to keep your body in check but at the same time not dangerous, and so it's a hard one to answer, and I get that when most people I speak to are quite conflicted in this post pandemic period. They were just not sure what the trajectory is post it. There's definitely been a step in awareness, and I think that the pandemic for the first time taught everybody that there can be acute impacts of air quality on you, but I don't know that it's been enough. That's the trouble. It's a hard one.

simon: 1:29:14

What do you hope people get out of this book? Reading it, because it's fantastic, by the way. I mean it was an absolute. I listened to it, both an audio book, which I can thoroughly recommend the narrator of that was excellent and, um, the the book itself. I have to say, though, it's a twice read book. There's no doubt about it. You find yourself on, you know. Anybody that's watching this on camera can see copious notes and marks in it. It's one of those books, not just because I knew I was talking to you, but because you're going. I need to go back to that bit. That's brilliant. What's your hope for the book that people get out of this book?

Carl: 1:30:00

I hope that they look back on the COVID pandemic that they lived through and think about it differently.

Carl: 1:30:09

I think that there was a story about COVID that I think a lot of people didn't really appreciate was playing out all around them and that was part of a big, deep, fascinating, messy history.

Carl: 1:30:30

And I would also hope that people would just look up into the sky and think about it differently, to recognize that it is just teeming with life, that the atmosphere is an ecosystem and you know some of it. You can see, you know maybe you see a dragonfly shooting past you or a hummingbird, but as you look up in the sky, it's just the life just keeps going up and up and up and you're a part of it. Your lungs are part of the atmosphere and that joins you. And you know it can be a little scary when you think about the things that you can breathe in that can give you tuberculosis or all sorts of terrible things, when you think about the things that you can breathe in that can give you tuberculosis or all sorts of terrible things. But it's also enthralling that we are a part of this remarkable space that we call the air.

simon: 1:31:24

Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Carl, thanks so much for spending the time talking to me this afternoon. It's been an absolute pleasure and I can't rate your book highly enough, particularly for geeks and nerds like myself that are into this space. But there's a broader story in this and I think anybody that's got any interest in the air that we breathe will have an interest in this book. So I can't recommend it highly enough and we'll certainly put it in the show notes. Carl, thanks very much. Much thanks for having me. Thanks for listening.

simon: 1:31:59

Before you go, can I ask a favor? If you enjoyed the podcast and know somebody else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with erico, eco, ultra protect, imbiot and 21 degrees all great companies who share the vision of the podcast and aren't here by accident. Your support of them helps them support this show. Do check them out in the links and in the show notes and at air quality mattersnet, and don't forget to check out the youtube channel by the same name, with plenty more content due to come on that channel. Thanks very much. See you next week.