I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

In the book I write about really remarkable research in the 1930s that demonstrated how droplets that contained

influenza viruses or tuberculosis bacteria or all these other pathogens could indeed float in the air

for hours. And this was newspaper headlines. And this was well known. It had been then been

forgotten and neglected and dismissed.

And so we treated COVID as if it couldn't be airborne.

You know, I'm sure that public health students are going to be studying that pivotal period

from January to June 2020 for decades to come.

How do you deal with a changing situation in a crisis?

People are dying left and right.

And it's up to you to get a message out, a message that has to change.

That's Carl Zimmer.

In his new book, Airborne, he tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers who discovered that

the sky is full of life, not just birds and insects, but trillions upon trillions of spores,

microbes, and viruses. And he explains how this knowledge was fatally overlooked when the COVID

pandemic struck.

Carl, I've been looking forward to this conversation with one of the great science

communicators talking about one of the most serious lapses in science communication that

affects all of our lives. And it had to do with the difficulty of people believing that disease

could be transmitted by air. The notion that it could be goes back to the ancient Greeks,

doesn't it? Sure. You can find, in the ancient Greeks, this belief that many diseases were caused

by what they would call miasmas.

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