Book Review: Tiny, Airborne Threats and Humans’ Reluctance to Face Them

Book Review: Small Airborne Threats and Human Reluctance to Deal With Them

Who Pitchaya Sudbanthad edited by Jen Schwartz

Non-fiction

Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe
Author: Carl Zimmer.
Dutton, 2025 ($32)

The air that surrounds us is more alive than we can imagine. What appears to be the gap in between is actually a vast ecosystem populated by life-giving cells, from fungal spores to plant pollen and the smallest scale organisms. We inhale and exhale rivers of life, and until the COVID-19 disaster reminded us of the intricate intimacy between humanity and the so-called aerobiome, we often did so without much awareness.

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The difficulty of directly observing life in the air has long shrouded its study in mystery and maintained inertia in its knowledge, explains journalist Carl Zimmer in his latest book: Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. Aerobiologists who think of the atmospheric environment as a habitat sometimes lament the invisibility of its biodiversity. But the field was not always so under-appreciated.

Air once dominated western science. Zimmer explains the variations in biological and medical knowledge where wild beliefs and contradictions can become accepted scientific fact and then return to obscurity. In the 5th century BCE, the theory of miasma from the texts of Hippocrates survived through the conservation work of Syrian monks and became the dominant explanation for disease in medieval Europe. “Bad air” rose from the foul rot to invade the body and disrupt the moods, causing diseases ranging from cholera to tuberculosis. Theory XIX. It persisted into the 19th century, when health officials, including Florence Nightingale, tried to prevent disease by changing hospital beds and opening windows to remove noxious odors.

The germ theory, however, was on the rise. After Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s innovations with the microscope in the late 1600s, scientists could more easily observe microorganisms everywhere, even in the air. In the late 1800s Louis Pasteur settled on showing how far microbes traveled; he even went up to the Alps to collect air samples. Emerging polluters believed that germs, not smoke, caused disease.

This development was to the chagrin of a medical establishment that labeled the contaminants “drinking water faith” and dismissed evidence that coma-like bacteria were behind cholera epidemics. Zimmer framed the long, heated, and tragic rivalry in the 1880s between the germ theorist Robert Koch and the miasmatist Max von Pettenkofer as a struggle that led to the decline of aerobiology in modern medicine.

But the fall from prominence did not signal the end of the curious scientists in the air. With remarkable detail and breadth, Zimmer chronicles the multigenerational comeback of a nearly lost science. At the turn of the 20th century, as American farmers suffered disastrous crop losses from wheat rust, the US government became interested in studying the aerial ranges of spores. Plant pathologist Fred Meier, a former watermelon expert, led the research, sometimes collaborating with Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart to capture air samples with high-flying petri dishes.

Meier’s helm would be inherited by William Firth Wells, a former water sanitation scientist who repurposed the method of trying to regenerate oyster populations with eggs to create an air centrifuge to trap pathogens. It was the ongoing work of Wells and his wife, Mildred, a physician and epidemiologist, that largely drove the science of airborne life into the 20th century. The path was not easy for Wells, as the medical establishment did not take kindly to the idea of ​​pathogens traveling long distances in the air in uncontrolled conditions.

But, as Zimmer ably demonstrates, a very changing world made the renaissance of aerobiology fateful. World War II, the Cold War, and the 9/11 era fostered paranoia that enemies could be found everywhere, and what’s scarier than airborne toxins and invisible viruses? These fears allowed worldwide experimentation with airborne biological weapons and the creation of larger and more monstrous “infection machines.” Zimmer writes about troubling exposures to deadly pathogens that are not always intentional or voluntary.

This anxiety about the proliferation of man-made bioweapons is less justified than concerns about natural disasters, such as SARS and H1N1 outbreaks in the 21st century. at the beginning of the century The era of rapid economic and social globalization, as well as its spread closer to dense cities and quarters, has only made the study of airborne pathogens more urgent.

However, while the availability of DNA sequencing and improved computer models helped confirm the reality of the air routes, authorities were often reluctant to tackle it. Zimmer links the institutional obstacles facing Wells to the challenges faced by defiant scientists who called the Group of 36 during the recent COVID pandemic: the inconsistency and lack of clarity of the World Health Organization, along with political pressures. aerial it shows how difficult it is to coexist harmoniously with oceans of unseen microbes in the air, but the bigger threat to our existence, says Zimmer, may come from our proximity.