Carl Zimmer: belief

Transcript context

…Birds fly through the air, bats fly through the air, and we’ve known about little tiny things since the invention of the microscope, which is what? Very late 16th century? People can’t just put the two together? They don’t have to have known for sure, but it seems it’s just not much, even if a candidate hypothesis. Was it really such a big blind spot? It really was. Again, things that seem clear to us now were not clear even to the very brightest minds centuries ago. Now, part of the reason, I think, is that there was, for thousands of years, an idea that the air itself could actually make you sick. In fact, for quite a long time, the standard view was that, if somehow the air became corrupted, it could cause diseases, yellow fever, all sorts of other diseases, and sometimes that would be called miasmas. Miasma is an ancient Greek word. Hippocrates talked about miasmas and really felt that that explained why you could suddenly get a lot of people sick all at once — all sorts of different people in a particular place — because the air had gone bad. Then in the 1600s, 1700s, there’s this group of people who say, “We think that there’s this invisible world of microorganisms” — fungi, bacteria, and so on, as they would be later known — that spread disease, not just in us, but in plants and so on. Experts at the time said, “This is ridiculous. You don’t have the evidence to prove this,” and so on. Once the germ theory of disease really took hold in the late 1800s, a lot of it was a fight between people who were saying, for example, cholera was being caused by miasmas, by bad air — leading doctors at the time in the mid-1800s. The people who were fighting for the germ theory of disease would say, “No, these are being caused by microorganisms. In the case of cholera, it’s in the water. It’s not in the air.” There was this gradual revelation: cholera caused by this particular bacteria, Vibrio cholerae in the water. Yellow fever not caused by miasma, caused by mosquitoes carrying a virus, and on and on and on and on. Eventually, some leading public health experts in the early 1900s just said, “All this concern about the air — this is just this obsolete miasma concept. Just rest easy, just put it aside. It doesn’t matter.” Literally, some people put that in print. [laughs] That was really a very strong consensus. Even in the 1930s when some crucial experiments started being done, people were still very much primed to ignore it. When are airborne allergies first understood?…

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