Carl Zimmer: belief

Transcript context

…Amazing they figured that out before they figured out airborne disease because carbon dioxide is truly invisible. Exactly, exactly, yes. It is an amazing history, and you really scratch your head. I think one of the most amazing things about that realization is that it was made by a German hygiene scientist named Max von Pettenkofer. Von Pettenkofer, himself, was actually a huge champion of the idea of miasmas. He believed that cholera and typhoid and all these other diseases were caused by gases that came out of the ground. He had no tolerance for this idea that you were actually ingesting bacteria. He just thought that was ridiculous. He even swallowed a whole tube of cholera once to prove that cholera was not caused by waterborne bacteria. He was that serious. He didn’t feel very well, but he survived, and he decided that proved his case. Great discovery about carbon dioxide. In fact, it was such a great discovery that, when people talk about the safe level of carbon dioxide in a room — sometimes people put it around 1,000 parts per million — they call it the Pettenkofer number. He lives on, and yet he was also incredibly wrong about a fundamental fact about airborne infection. Science just doesn’t follow a neat path the way we’d like. In a way, that’s one of the things that makes it so interesting to write about. I often hear that when I’m flying on a plane, the air is quite good and well-ventilated. Not boarding, not deboarding, but during the flight. Is that true?…

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