Carl Zimmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you note in your book, the field of what’s called aerobiology — there’s been a lot of military and national security, almost a domination of the field, a lot of funding but also a lot of influence. On net, do you think that has helped or hurt the field relative to the counterfactual of that not being there? 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. In fact, the very name aerobiology had been coined in 1937 by a researcher named Fred Meier who was really emerging. He was 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. 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 Detrick to do research that could have been really helpful to understanding airborne disease if it hadn’t been classified. It was classified, and most of it stayed classified for a very long time, and it was almost like a brain drain. William Firth 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 used by the Army in World War II to develop this biological war machine. He was appalled after the war. The way he described its effect on science is, 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 theater of war. It even affects our public health, I would argue. Instead of looking at public health as an opportunity to 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, became a fight against an enemy attack. Literally, the same people who were building a lot of our modern public health system were consulting with the army on biological warfare. Some of my friends worry about microplastics in the air. Should they worry?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.