hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I am speaking with Carl Zimmer Carl as far as I know is the only person who has both a tapeworm and an asteroid named after him the approximate reason for this episode is Carl's excellent new book it's called Airborne the hidden history of the life we breathe Carl is also a long-standing columnist for the New York Times he
teaches is writing at Yale and he has numerous other science books on biology Evolution heredity and other topics Carl welcome thanks so much for having me I'm interested in issues surrounding the progress of Science and if we think of the notion of disease being transmitted through the air it seems that comes to our attention really quite late in time late 19th century it's not
truly accepted until later in the 20s Century the idea doesn't seem that crazy why did it take so long you know it's a great question and one that I was thinking about a lot while working on this book and I think maybe part of the issue is that when we look back at history especially the history of science we we tend to rewrite it uh we tend to pretend that things were uh simpler than they really were
and uh we ignore all the debates in the way that ideas pop up and flourish for a while and then disappear and then come back again and I think that the idea that something alive could come through the air and make you sick or kill you was in a way uh in the words of of one uh journalist in in France in uh the 1860s just too fantastic to imagine uh and so it really you know it really
strained the imagination um even if today we're starting to get used to it it's it's a it's a it's a frightening idea because it makes us feel particularly helpless you know because you know we can wash our hands uh all day long and keep ourselves safe that way but you have to breathe and so uh I I I think that uh there was there were a lot of reasons many different reasons
for for the scientific Community to to look away and to say no this isn't happening or it isn't important but you know b 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 so 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 of a candidate hypothesis was it really such a big blind spot it really was uh and you know again you know things that seem clear to us now uh were not clear even to you know the very brightest Minds uh centuries ago um 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 uh for uh quite a long time the
standard view was that if if somehow the air became corrupted it could cause diseases yellow fever all sorts of other diseases uh and sometimes that would be called miasmas you know miasma is an ancient Greek word hypocrates talked about miasmas and 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 in a
particular place because the air had gone bad and uh then in the uh you know 1600s 1700s there's this group of people who say um we think that there's this invisible world of microorganisms uh fungi bacteria and so on as they would be later known that spread disease not just in us but in plants and so on and PE experts at the time said this is ridiculous you don't
have the evidence to prove this and so on and um and so once the germ theory of disease really took hold in in the late 1800s a lot of it was a a fight between people who were saying for example chera was being caused by my asthmas by bad air leading doctors of the time in in the mid 1800s and the people who were fighting for The Germ Theory disease they would say no these are being caused by
microorganisms in the case of chera it's in the water it's not in the air and so there was this gradual kind of Revelation Cala caused by this particular bacteria viool in the water um yellow fever uh not not caused by myanma caused by mosquitoes carrying a virus and on and on and on and on and So eventually some leading Public Health experts in the early 1900s just said all this concern about the air this is just
this is just this obsolete myasthma concept and we just just rest easy just put it aside it it doesn't matter I mean literally some people put that in print and um so so that was really a very strong consensus and so even in the 1930s when some crucial experiments started being done uh people were still very much primed to ignore it when are airborne allergies first understood
well it it goes back to uh you know a British doctor in the uh in the 18 uh 60s and 70s uh Blackley who actually like uh thought that he was sneezing because you know uh because of the of pollen in being released by grass he he would walk by these hay fields and he would have this ter terrible hay fever and he'd say I think there's something in the air and um so you know he would
rub the pollen put in his nose and start sneezing and he would say well okay this is not a good sign and then he started to wonder in an incredibly Visionary way like well okay these plants all around me they're releasing pollen into the air where does it go and no one could say because you know pollen grains you know they're they're too small for you to really follow them by the by the naked
eye so so he would do these amazing things like he built himself a kite and he put a little uh uh Probe on the kite uh that could where pollen grains could stick to and it went up you know he he flew this kite over a th feet in the air and he would uh and he would bring it down and sometimes he would find pollen grains on it and it was really astonishing I mean you would fly he
would fly over the ocean when the wind was coming from the sea and he would still get polling grains and he would say like I think that the winds are carrying these living things for hundreds of miles thousands of feet in the air and this was this was kind of an idea that very few people at the time really were appreciating now people thought oh this is silly when he published his his results a lot of a lot
of people dismissed it they were sure that hay Fe was was an infectious disease caused by bacteria or some people thought well it's a neurosis and we wasn't until the early 1900s that after black Lea died that it became clear that no actually what's happening is that when you're exposed to certain things like pollen grains that you inhale in some cases it's your own
immune system that is that is mounting an attack on them and making you feel miserable makes your nose run and makes you cough and gives you all the symptoms of an allergy um and so you know blackle himself never really got to see that um that he was actually right and uh but it wasn't that he was getting sick it was in a way that his own body was mounting this this uh this incorrect defense
called an allergy but shouldn't that be one of the easiest hypotheses to establish so the seasons change right the pollen mostly goes away your allergy goes away or you clear the field of pollen or you move house and your allergy changes shouldn't people have figured that out in 800 ad or whatever just right away and everyone else accepts it because it's Common Sense are we that
stupid I I think great ideas can just sit around for a long time waiting to be discovered and I don't think that's unique to airborne disease I think that's really true across the board for a lot of different Sciences I mean certainly you know a lot of historians of science have said Charles Darwin brilliant guy but really like the evidence was there for a long time uh someone else should have f fig this out
first but but at least they the chch the church is an opponent right so you might be persecuted it's easier for me to understand that mistake but even that one broke through uh it it did break through yes and um you I think uh part of the issue is sort of the structure of science so um when I'm telling you about this story about this British Doctor Who's flying kites trying to catch pollen grains is
just one guy it's just one person who's really miserable hay fever who's trying to understand it for himself and you know science really works by numbers like you you actually like have to study lots and lots and lots of people um you and then you know if you're going to try to tie people's symptoms to the environment in some way well you're going to actually going to have to track
them over months years and so on because the arment is changing all the time you know everybody who suffers from hate fever will tell you like well I don't know for some reason this spring it's not so bad I don't know why that doesn't mean they don't have hay fever it just means that the environment that's causing the hay fever is changing a lot so so there are some basic challenges to
really appreciating um how what we're breathing in is is affecting us why was it so hard at least at first for the W and CDC to talk about and admit the Airborne transmission of covid-19 that to me also seems inexplicable that was uh in a way one of the entry points for me into writing this book because you know during uh the pandemic and you know the outset in 2020
you know a lot of reporters like myself we were scrambling to write about this entirely new disease and so and we were talking with Scientists who themselves were scrambling to make sense of this you know new new virus on the scene and so there were lots of questions and it's it's you know it seemed really peculiar that there W that there was this big conflict that broke out about how Co
spread and that it took quite a while for the World Health Organization and the CDC to really like just say out loud Co is Airborne um now like that's that is like laid out in in on documents online like that is generally accepted that that you know Airborne transmission is a really important way that Co spreads and it does a really good job that way I and so that led me down this path to try to
understand why it is that there was this inertia and and I think it goes way way back um and it goes It goes back to these battles I was talking about over the germ theory of disease and the way that you know Airborne transmission by the early 1900s was really being seen as something that was just not significant not something to worry about and so even when evidence strong evidence was being
put forward by um people who we've long forgotten about people like William fth Wells and his wife Mildred Wells um people other people were looking at the results and being like I don't know I I'm just I'm not going to accept that there was a there was a consensus and that that and then that consensus became established as part of you know Public Health policy and you know it's also
true that if you're if you acknowledge that a disease is airborn and you really want to deal with it seriously like it's it's going to take a lot to really address it I mean if something is just spreading um by dry droplets on Surface and so on you know you can tell people just wash your hands disinfect surfaces and you'll be fine um but it's quite something else when indoor air is
starting to become Rife with these pathogens that we are exhaling into it but the common cold is Airborne measles many many other things the common cold is a kind of Corona virus right so uh even taking their bureaucratic nature into account I still find it utterly baffling that they would have resisted that rather than issuing open statements that would have given them and out in
either direction how do you model them bureaucratically I think that um I think public health is is a just a really challenging line of work just because um you you want to reduce death and disease uh by um coming up with measures that are going to apply across the board to the public and um that depends on what you understand about the disease you are trying to uh deal with um and
then when you're dealing with diseases where we don't know that much about it yet um you're you're in a in a very tricky situation you know do you um do do you go you know go extremely um cautious you know and say like this could spread in any different way and we have to completely Silo ourselves off um or do you say like well we're not we don't have clear evidence that it's Airborne so you don't have to
worry about that where do you draw the line um Public Health policy is is a is a a hugely difficult and contentious area it's been you know since the start of of Public Health um now along with that there's the scientific question of whether these things are airborne or not and um you mentioned measles for example it it really wasn't until the 1970s that people really agreed that measles are
airborne even though it's incredibly Airborne it's the most contagious disease that we know of um Co might be you know in the same ballpark now but it took a long time for people to to amass the evidence to really persuade the community what's the rate of return to further investment in ultraviolet lamps now you know it could be really uh quite large I mean I I haven't seen you know
economic calculations of that but um as I write in Airborne in the book uh you know the idea that you could Safeguard the air with ultraviolet light is is not new uh and in fact William and Mildred Wells were demonstrating it in the 1930s um they uh they actually put uh ultraviolet lamps up in scho a couple schools in the Philadelphia area uh and protected the children there from musles
outbreaks uh they uh and they did all sorts of other experiments to at least show that there was a potential promise there uh and uh you know ultraviolet lamps could potentially um really uh help in certain places to to make it possible to just to just uh go about our business and and relax because the the air around us is being uh disinfected um and you know there there still needs to
be more research to figure out how do you use these lights to uh to safely protect you know large volumes of air um how do you you want to make sure that the ultrav Viet radiation isn't itself like uh creating any harmful compounds in the air that you might breathe and that might be a problem but these are all things that could be addressed um and so you know ultra violet light could
definitely be um a part of a of a real you know serious approach to uh keeping indoor air safe but maybe my worry as an economist is that it ends up being too much like Patchwork so you can take any arbitrarily small area and maybe make it safer I don't pretend to know the science but say you could but unless you have ultraviolet lamps more or less everywhere you're just redistributing
you know where people will pick up the disease or the other problem isn't there a property rights issue that makes ultraviolet lamps unlikely to succeed property rights in what sense well there's so many different property owners who would have to do it you would need a very clear majority of them otherwise you're just s pushing the problem around you know like toothpaste in a tube well I it's certainly not the
case that you know ultraviolet light would be like the sole trick to protect us from Airborne diseases from new pandemics that travel through the air but building Engineers who have looked into this and have developed ideas have been arguing um that you'd have you could you could put out standards for how clean uh your indoor air should be how free of disease uh and then you
could meet that those standards in a number of different ways so one way would be ventilation uh fresh air um you know if you you know there's plenty of Life Outdoors but um that that life is much more dilute than what ha what you get in poorly ventilated indoor places so there are lots of ways to um to bring fresh air into uh indoor spaces uh and you know there are are air purification
systems there filters and so on there are lots of different uh uh things that can be brought to the table and um and this is an area of of new research too um you know the go the US government um has $150 million project underway to develop um you know Cutting Edge new sensors that would basically like be able to tell you you know there we're detecting flu virus you know in this
building uh in real time those kinds of Technologies could then be yet another way to uh make sure that the air we breathe is safe how should we reform ventilation in schools uh well there are uh actually schools that are already uh doing this um it's a very Patchwork thing but um if you look at places like Denver and Boston um they are using uh combinations of these Technologies so they are
they're improving the ventilation they're putting in filters they're sometimes putting uh air purifiers in individual classrooms they're and also most importantly they're they're finding ways to to see how healthy the air is um the simplest way to do that actually is just to measure the level of carbon dioxide in the air um this is something that actually like people figured out uh
in the mid 1800s um as I write about in the book because you know if you are sitting there and you're talking to me and you're exhaling you are you know filling the room you're in with carbon dioxide and if you don't have a window open it's just going to keep building up gradually so um amazing they figured that out before they figured out airborne disease right because carbon dioxide is true truly
invisible exactly exactly yeah it's it is it is an amazing history and and it really you really scratch your head um and I I think one of the most amazing things about that realization is that it was made by a German hygiene scientist named Max von poffer and Von poffer himself was actually a huge champion of the idea of miasmas uh and he believed uh that you know chera and and typhoid
and all these other disease were caused by gases that came out of the ground he had no tolerance for this idea that that bet you were you know actually ingesting bacteria he just thought that was ridiculous he even swallowed a whole tube of caler once to prove that c was not caused by waterborne bacteria he was that serious um he didn't feel very well but he survived and he decided that
proved his case um so so great discovery about carbon dioxide uh it's in fact it's so it was such a great discovery that when people talk about sort of the safe level of carbon dioxide in a room sometimes people put it around thousand parts per million they call it the the pet and Coffer number so he lives on and yet uh he you know he was also incredibly wrong about a
fundamental fact about airbone infection you know science just doesn't follow a neat path the way we'd like and in a way that's one of the things that makes it so interesting right 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 yeah I've talked to uh a few physicists and and air quality experts
and yeah they generally agree that you know most planes have uh really good uh you know ventilation systems and filtration systems on board so certainly uh if there's somebody with an airborne disease like covid on your flight um you know basic physics is going to dictate that you know when you're flying and it's that system is actually running your rist is going to be lower because
they're going to pull pathogens out of the air um on the other hand when you're when you're boarding and um those systems aren't on yet and so and lots of people are breathing in a small space and they don't even have to cough I mean people can just exhale talk and they might be releasing tiny droplets that float around and can float through the whole cabin so uh that's a that's a
issue and then also um you know if you if you were to take one of these uh carbon dioxide meters on a plane I own one if you take one on a plane and you'll notice when you land that the carbon dioxide level will go way back up again because they turn the filter system off and you're taxing around on the tarmac and waiting to get out so um so certainly you know it's something to
bear in mind um when you're you're taking a plane uh you know are if you're going to decide whether to wear a mask or not and um that doesn't mean that your your risk is zero when you're you know way up in the air and the system is running full strength did antio masking work uh I yes I I it it worked in the sense that there are um you know a number of studies that show that in you
know different situations when you know masking policies and put in place along with other measures um you would see a reduction in Risk uh and you know but are they randomized control trials I mean do we really know well um there's been a debate about randomized control trials for some doing for something like masks and so certainly there are uh some experts who say like you can only judge
this based on randomized control trials um and but there are other other experts uh who say well that's a bit like saying we need we need a randomized control trial to show that hard hats work um that you know the physics shows you how it works um now do people need to use these things carefully yeah definitely um but you can you can actually show you you can study the way that uh these masks
trap particles and so on to show that um you're just going to breathe less uh you know virus Laden air and also randomized control trials themselves um they're they can be very effective in in many different settings but they're not perfect um and so um if you you know if you run a a a a a clinical trial with you know poor stady design uh or or if you you know analyze it incorrectly it's
it's not going to it's not going to be as good as as if you were to be taking more careful measures so you know there's there is certainly I would say yes there's certainly a a debate that's going on in the community but um but certainly you know um in a number of reviews that uh that have been coming out recently the consensus is that masks do help I would think the strongest argument for masks was simply that a lot
of people hated them and so they would stay home instead and we know that would work but when people are making analogies to things like hard hats where it's very very obvious physically what's happening uh that's a sign the argument is quite weak and if I go to a social Gathering for two hours either with a mask or without a mask and I don't mean the highest quality medical masks we
know they work uh I think it's highly uncertain whether masks work and I've read a good half dozen of those papers I didn't think they were really very good uh I came away agnostic not convinced masks don't work but it seemed to me the Public Health Community was far too optimistic about masks and were not really following their own standards of evidence why is that wrong
well uh I I part there are many different uh aspects to just something as seemingly simple as masking um so part of the question is what kind of masks are we talking about um uh there you know the Centers for Disease Control when it decided oh maybe maybe covid is uh spreading through the air and and we need to think really fast of ways to stop it and we have this shortage of surgical masks and
uh n95 respirators they said well just put on a cloth mask maybe that will reduce the risk somewhat um and that was a public health measure based on you know some some small studies from a few years before but again you know there's you there cloth Mass there are surgical Mass there are n95 masks there are these sort of masks that are called duck bill masks um and so you know when you're asking
does masking work one of the questions is well what kind of masks are we talking about um and you know then we're saying well you know how how are people using those masks um when people say they're using the mask are they just do you see them with their nose hanging out of it you know like that's not going to work in the in the same way that you know if someone is you know if you say
oh motorcycle cycle helmets will will help uh reduce reduce deaths on the road and if people are just if sometimes you see someone with a helmet on and it's unstrapped and you're like well that's not going to work um so so there are a lot of these questions that go into it and so yeah you you will certainly see some studies that may not inspire you um but you know there are I've looked at a lot
of these studies and talked to a lot of experts and I would say just judging from where we are now that's the con census that I described before what's your best theory about the anthrax mailings well um I you know I I can only go on you know all of the investigations that uh that went into this uh at the time um just to refresh people's memories that um in the in the wake of
911 and the when these planes crashed into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon there there was a real fear about um an airborne disease attack because biological weapons which are you know basically weaponized Airborne diseases um they had been developed in the United States and Elsewhere for decades um and so there were these uh worries that um maybe you know Iraq or terrorist organizations had gotten a
hold of some of these weapons and were going to use them um and uh the first hint that this might have happened was that these the envelopes started showing up um at you know News offices and elsewhere with powdered Anthrax and people would open it up and it would go into the air and they might inhale it and in uh a number of cases people died and so the first idea was that this
was um oh this this must be Al Qaeda um and and must a terrorist attack this is what we were terrified of um but all those fears and all that Terror um actually uh kind of I think sort of distracted people and um you know it took quite a while uh for the FBI and very scientists to get a better handle on it and when they looked at the at the actual Anthrax itself they said well
this looks actually like this is not something that was made in some Soviet lab this looks like it was just here in the good old USFA specifically at uh Fort Dietrich which was kind of the headquarters of this aerobiological germ warfare research since World War II uh so you know uh you know there was a a person who um was identified by the FBI who uh you know and and was going to be
arrested and he committed suicide before he could be arrested um so you know I don't you know I I I think that it's plausible that you know he was the one um that I had certainly haven't seen compelling evidence of alternate uh ideas but you know but there's been no evidence actually linking him to it you would think well once he's dead it would be easy to find all the ties the
connections things in his home notes he made something but the as far as I know there was nothing yes and and there have been right and there have been people who have questioned um you know zeroing in on him um and uh you know people who have sort of you know uh sort of G come to his defense um as someone who wouldn't do something like this but um I you know I until until there's more
evidence um I it's really it's really hard to to make a theory that would be a responsible one to to consider now as you note in your book the field of what's called aerobiology there's been a lot of military and National Security almost domination of the field a lot of funding uh but also a lot of influence Anette 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 uh the the way that aerobiology got turned into biological warfare was was quite a tragedy because uh you know this was a science that at the time was just getting off the ground um and in fact the very name aerobiology had been coined in 1937 by um a researcher named Fred Meyer um who was really kind of emerging he was going to be he was really going to
lead aerobiology into the Modern Age and going to turn it into a what might have been a really remarkable uh new science uh he died in a plane crash uh that's what happened when you're looking for life in the air unfortunately and um and shortly afterwards in in World War II uh the US military basically um started classifying uh lots of uh information about how diseases spread
through the air and um and PE and lots of people came to uh what was then Camp dri to do uh research that um could have been really helpful to understanding airborne disease if it hadn't been classified but it was classified most of it stayed classified for a very long time and just it was just sort of almost like a brain drain um and so William fth Wells who I mentioned before who really pioneered
the idea that you can get sick from the from the air around you inside of buildings and so on uh he 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 this biological War Machine and he was appalled after the war he and he and he said he the way he described its effect on science it was it was the suicide of bacteriology in other words
he just thought this was a terrible thing for scientist to do to to instead of trying to look in the air and figure out how to protect lives to uh de better and better uh weapons for killing people for causing Mass starvation and so on and this is so this and 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 to use Arab biology as a as a new um kind of theater of war and um it even affects their Public Health I would argue then instead of looking at Public Health as an opportunity to ort of Reform the conditions in which we are in order to uh promote health and well-being um to some extent Public Health especially in the United States became um sort of you know a fight
against an enemy attack and so you literally you had people you know the 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 mic Plastics in the air should they worry I I think that we need to be studying this absolutely there's no question I mean uh you know in my book
I'm really focused on living things in the air um we have put lots of other things into the air uh and so uh microplastics are a new addition to air pollution but um you know even uh just you know good old um you know particulate matter from cars and and uh power plants and so on you know kills several million people around the world every year uh it's a it's a major uh attack on on human health so yes
microplastics I think certainly bear uh uh more research not just in the air but you know in our water everywhere I have some questions about your other books how much do you think there's life on icy moons typically in oceans yeah so uh in my book life's Edge I um you know I I I was writing about kind of um you know how far we can push our concepts of life and and you know can we
think about life elsewhere and um I certainly think that the icy moons of the outer solar system are uh are the most interesting place to look for life um you know Mars that's great that's fine you know I'm I I wish them well as they're digging through through the the dust and the dirt but um but imagine imagine drilling down through the ice and sending a probe into uh a huge uh
ocean uh what is that world like it might have life in it or at the very least it might have some really interesting chemistry maybe maybe these are places where life has yet to form um so uh so I can't say whether there's life there or not but um there's certainly good reason to think that there might be life there and if there isn't that might be a place to kind of get some clues about how life begins on
places like our own Planet what's your point estimate for there being life on the icy moons in our solar system I have not done that math um but there's some bet I could offer you where you would take it right just intuitively um I if I offer you 100 to one odds you'll take the BET right uh thousand to one odds yeah I or I I think I think it's let me put it this way I think you
know on a planet by planet Moon by Moon basis it's very unlikely that there's life out there but there's so many planets and moons in in even our galaxy that um I'm sure that there is life of some form elsewhere whether it's right next door in our solar system I think it's highly unlikely but uh but I think it's likely enough that I would love for us to go check it out um
um and you know even even Venus um you know I mean there are actually other people who say well forget those icy moons forget Mars what about Venus and this actually ties into uh Airborne my book because you know you might think Venus that's crazy I mean it's so hot on the surface of Venus you can melt lead in in that in that air but the fact is that um when you get pretty high up in the atmosphere
there there are clouds up there where things aren't that bad and you know we have clouds here on Earth that have lots of microbes in them um they get into the clouds they hang out there then they fall back out and more come in so there could be this sort of aerial life on Venus maybe life started on the surface of Venus and then rose up into the air and now it's staying up there um there a
lot so we're at n equals to the one ocean we know has life the one set of clouds we know has life uh and you won't take a 100 to one bet that there's life somewhere else in the solar system I would think you should take a tent to one bet on that one well you know um no one's offered me the money yet so uh so I haven't really had to to put my money where my mouth is yet but uh yeah something to think about
is Lee Cronin right or insane so Lee Cronin is a chemist in Scotland uh University of Glasgow and um he has this IDE idea uh that um you can explain life with a theory a theory that uh he and others call assembly Theory which is about um basically like how many steps does it take for something to get produced and uh and you the things in our bodies you know the the molecules
that make us up uh some of them are very small and simple but some of them are exquisitely big and complex and they Lee and others argue that um that life is what is able to uh to assemble things Beyond a certain threshold um and so this would might be a way to actually like identify life on a planet even if you don't know what life is made of I mean we can't assume that life is just made of DNA
like that's an unreasonable assumption life might you know life on Earth already blows our minds many ways at least mine um but life on other worlds um maybe that you know maybe that bet is right and there's life on Enceladus or some other icy Moon um it might be really really really strange but maybe we can recognize it by this assembly index um not only could this be assembly
Theory be a way to recognize life uh but it might be actually a way leonin thinks to make life and in other words you it guides you in in in basically creating a set of chemical reactions where you're creating these these right now he's got uh these robots that are basically making droplets with different chemicals in them in this vast number of combinations and he's wondering if they
will eventually start to sort of take on the some of the pr the Hallmarks of Life uh so in other words yes he is trying to make life he's actively trying to make life right now and and um and you know he a lot of people think he's he's kind of crazy a lot of people think he's quite brilliant some people think he's both I like him I don't know if he's right he's a lot of fun to talk to
absolutely absolutely yeah and and um and he has you know uh it's been really interesting watching assembly Theory sort of come to the four uh recently um and some scientists really take badly to it in a a very hostile way but um but as is often the case I it feels like sometimes people are just talking past each other um that uh and they're not really speaking the same language so I
think because assembly theory is new and it's very interdisciplinary I think it's going to take a while for the scient scientific Community to really engage with it and decide whether it holds up or not um you know it's this is I look at this as um you know uh it's I I think you know as I argue in life sge life is a is is is a property of matter and uh scientists are trying to explain it and
some of them are trying to explain with a theory superconductivity is a property of matter and there were a bunch of theories that were put forward about it including by Einstein and that were wrong and it wasn't until eventually some people came up with the Right theory that really clicked in and was had a powerful full explanatory power um so we're not there yet with life and so
maybe Lee Cronin is going to be like Einstein and he's wrong or maybe he will be one of the people who is right over time how much will DNA information enter our daily lives so to give it a strange example imagine that for a college application you have to upload some of your DNA now to unimaginative people that will sound impossible but if you think about the equilibrium rolling
itself out slowly well at first St students disclose their DNA right and over time the DNA becomes used for job hiring for marriage for in many other ways uh is this our future equilibrium that genetic information will play this very large role given how many qualities seem to be you know at least 40 to 60% inheritable maybe more well um you know there's a the the term that a scientist uh in this field
would use would be heritable not inheritable and heritability is is a slippery thing uh to uh to think about um and I I I write a lot about that in a book she has her mother's laugh which is about heredity in general and heritability really is just saying like Okay in a certain situation if I if I look at uh you know different people or different animals or different plants
how much of their variation can I can I connect with variation in their genome um and you know that's it um that you know can you then you know use that variability to then make predictions about you know what's going to happen in the future that is a that is a totally different question in in a you know but it's not totally different I mean your whole family is super smart right if I
knew nothing about you and I knew about the rest of your family I'd be more inclined to let you and TL and that would have been a good decision again only on average but just basic statistics that well you're very kind um but um you know I'm uh I mean you know what but what do you mean by you know what do you mean by intelligent like I'm I'm uh I'm very I I'd like to think I'm pretty good with
words and that I can understand scientific Concepts I remember in college getting to a certain point with Calculus and being like I'm done and then watching other people like Sail on but look you're clearly very smart the New York Times recognized this we all know statistics is valid there aren't any certainties it sounds like you're running away from the science just endorse the fact you came
from a very smart family and that means it's quite a bit more likely that you'll be very smart too and eventually the world will start using that information would be the auxiliary hypothesis but I'm asking you how much will it well I I the question you know that uh we started with was about you know actually like uploading DNA and so there then the question becomes like how much of that
uh information about the future can you get out of DNA and um you know I I I think that uh you know you just have to be incredibly um uh cautious about jumping to conclusions about it BEC just because there are you know the genome is a wild and willly place in there and the genome exists in in environments and you know even if you even if you see sort of broad correlations uh on a population level um
I I would I would not you know as a as a College admission person I would certainly not feel confident like just scanning someone's DNA for for information in that regard um no that wouldn't be all you would do right they do plenty of other things now uh but over time you know say for job hiring we'll have the AI evaluate your interview the AI evaluate your DNA it
will be highly imperfect but at some point uh institutions will start doing it if not in this country somewhere else China Singapore UAE wherever they're not going to be so shy right um I can certainly imagine people uh wanting to uh do that sort of stuff regardless of the strength uh of the approach and certainly we have seen um you know even in the early 1900s we saw people uh more more than willing to um
to use ideas about uh you know inherited levels of intelligence to for example um you know decide you know uh uh what people you know which people should be institutionalized who should be allowed into the United States or not so for example you know Jews were considered largely to be you know developmentally disabled um at one point so uh especially you know the uh you know the
the Jews from Eastern Europe so I you know like we have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump uh from uh from the kind of the the the basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often you know serve their own interests and I think we I think we should be on guard that we not do that again will embryo selection ever become you know completely socially
accepted I you know that is a uh because there are people doing it now right it's not yet a thing but it's growing well certainly you know I mean with with IVF um you know people are going to want to select uh the embryos that have the most likely chance of of surviving uh so you you know you're going to take a look for you know any sort of clear abnormalities um and you
know it certainly is um um possible to you know let's say let's say that you are you you have um you have a a dominant genetic disorder like Huntington's disease you know the the technology is there that you could say like okay we created these these uh fertilized embryos um let's just let's not use the ones that are carrying uh this marker um but you can even you can even
go before that um potentially you could say like okay we're going to like even before fertilization say like okay we're going to just take out the sperm or the eggs that have a marker that that for for one of these you know strongly inherited diseases like Huntington's disease um you know will people then um you know move on to to that future like that I I I I I don't I can't predict
whether they will or not uh and whether they should or not I think is a separate issue um but again um I think that uh I think one of the dangers is that people will uh convince themselves that um the information we have about DNA is going to uh in ensure things about their kids that um that they can't be sure about um and then you're going to have this sort of lifetime of watching your kid not live
up to your genetically encoded expectations I mean that so uh you know that's one of many uh uh dangers I see in going down this road why do you think the Flyn effect seems to be so especially strong for the Ravens part of IQ tests this has puzzled me for a long time do you have a hypothesis I mean I certainly haven't done any uh you know my own original research on it I'm a journalist not a
scientist but but you've read plenty right I mean you have a a sense of the field yeah yeah no absolutely abs and it and you know and it I've I've read about it in part because it's just this fascinating thing that that there has been this increase in IQ scores and and um it's certainly not a result of some sort of genetic process um you know uh there you cannot explain uh a rise in IQ
scores in so many different countries um because somehow people are you know being born with different kinds of DNA um in some sort of like evolutionary process that is not happening so what is happening um and I you know I think that there probably are several different explanations for it and I think I don't know I mean one of one of them is might be that you know we
live we live we kids grow up in an environment that um where just you know everyday life is more about the kinds of the kinds of thinking that you encounter on an IQ test you know like what you know people are you know using digital devices for example and just like there could be just a a way that you know the the the kind of life we leading just leads to people doing
better on IQ test now you know certainly some people do better than others and you know is there an influence of DNA on that yes uh I think I I think there the evidence is there that there is it's not necessarily a huge uh uh account but in any case you can have these different things happening all at once um is is something interesting it's frustrating that you know it's really hard to uh actually
like take these different hypotheses about the Flint effect I mean maybe it's you know maybe it's something about our health you know but how do you how do you really rigorously test those things I haven't seen a lot of rigorous tests of the different hypotheses I've just said seen people say like well this could explain it which is fine but not totally satisfying if we take you know
the entirety of science you've written on many topics in a very useful way science policy where do you think your views are furthest from the mainstream or the Orthodoxy where do you have like the weirdest take relative to the other people you know and respect oh wow like I think we should just do plenty of human challenge trials that would be an example of something you might say but what would the answer
be for you uh you mean human challenge trials for like influenza and things like that whatever we need to we should have for covid right it would have sped up the vaccine save thousands or maybe more lives rather than wait for people to be infected you infect them deliberately and call for volunteers right you can pay them if you need to so that would be a view I have that's somewhat outside
the mainstream though less outside than it used to be what would two or three of your non-mainstream views be well wow I I I I you know it's it I the thing is that that when I am writing about you know the science itself in terms of like that you know scientific findings that are just coming out every day and I tell people about them they'll say like what that is crazy
and I'll just be like I'm just telling you about what scientists are discovering about our our world and so you know if I if I describe what you know whale scientists are discovering about how whales communicate um you know I'm not going you know wildly Beyond you know what what they're finding and their their theories but to most people that's crazy that you know that whales can hear
each other across oceans and can uh you know change their songs uh but that's mainstream now right you're just endorsing the mainstream and I would agree with that like I think whales might be smarter than humans that's a non-mainstream view I have like what are your non-mainstream views you know I I I guess I don't really um I I it's interesting that I'm sort of drawing a a blank on that simply
because like I am just so uh dazzled by so much that I learn about um in terms of the scientific world so you know what is the scientific mainstream is just can be quite mind-blowing to everybody else if so if I just say offhand like oh yeah you know there are billions of microbes in that cloud you see in the sky people say like you're crazy I'm like I'm not crazy so um so I am a sort
of scientifically mainstream sort of person I guess and to everybody else I seem a little crazy younger in life what is it you learned about New Jersey politics noting your father was a former New Jersey Congressman dick Zimmer um you know New Jersey politics is um is it got a rich long history of of corruption and just just Rough and Tumble uh kind of activity um I was you
know very proud to to see my dad you know stay above that Fray um you know I live in uh Connecticut now and Connecticut's got its its share of corruption too but um still you know uh New Jersey was really quite a quite a place to see all sorts of uh scandals in action so you learned that a non-corrupt New Jersey politics was possible that's an on- mainstream view right well it certainly was my experience growing up
with my dad yeah and his district was what near Monmouth County or Delaware River where did you grow up exactly um so when I was uh so when I was 10 we moved to uh pretty close to the Delaware River in Hunting County in New Jersey and so that that was when my father was elected to congress that was his district before my last question just to endorse Carl's book again Airborne the
hidden history of the life we breathe and indeed I'm a fan of all of Carl's books I think I've read all of them or very close to all of them but very last question what will you do next what will I do next um well uh I'm uh I'm working on a podcast I can't really talk about it at length right now uh we'll there'll be more details later so I'm kind of entering your world a
little bit um and it's it's fun and frightening um and then and then it'll just be a question of thinking about what the next book is and I generally just um let those ideas come to me because um it's got to be something that's going to really uh be something I can live with for years uh and so I don't I don't choose the next book lightly so it hasn't come yet Carl Zumer thank you very much thank you