Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science communicators of our time, having spent decades writing about biology, evolution, and heredity. His latest (and 16^th) book, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, explores something even more fundamental—how the very air around us is teeming with life, from pollen to pathogens to microbes floating miles above the Earth.

He joins Tyler to discuss why it took scientists so long to accept airborne disease transmission and more, including why 19th-century doctors thought hay fever was a neurosis, why it took so long for the WHO and CDC to acknowledge COVID-19 was airborne, whether ultraviolet lamps can save us from the next pandemic, how effective masking is, the best theory on the anthrax mailings, how the U.S. military stunted aerobiology, the chance of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, what Lee Cronin’s “assembly theory” could mean for defining life itself, the use of genetic information to inform decision-making, the strangeness of the Flynn effect, what Carl learned about politics from growing up as the son of a New Jersey congressman, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded January 15th, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:25.9	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:30.2	Today, I am speaking with Carl Zimmer.
0:32.9	Carl, as far as I know, is the only person who has both a tapeworm and an asteroid named after him.
0:39.3	The proximate reason for this episode is Carl's excellent new book. It's called Airborne,
0:44.9	the hidden history of the life we breathe. Carl is also a long-standing columnist for the New York
0:50.8	Times. He teaches writing at Yale, and he has numerous other science books on
0:55.9	biology, evolution, heredity, and other topics. Carl, welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
1:02.3	I'm interested in issues surrounding the progress of science. And if we think of the notion of
1:09.0	disease being transmitted through the air, it seems that
1:12.9	comes to our attention really quite late in time.
1:16.3	Late 19th century, it's not truly accepted until later in the 20th century.
1:21.9	The idea doesn't seem that crazy.
1:24.0	Why did it take so long?
1:26.5	You know, it's a great question, and one that I was thinking about a lot
1:31.3	while working on this book. And I think maybe part of the issue is that when we look back at history,
1:39.1	especially the history of science, we tend to rewrite it. We tend to pretend that things were simpler than they really were.
1:48.0	And we ignore all the debates in the way that ideas pop up and flourish for a while and then
	...

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