Did a socially awkward scientist set back airborne disease control?
Health Did a socially awkward scientist set back airborne disease control? Carl Zimmer.Photos by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer Clea Simon Harvard Correspondent March 7, 2025 5 min read In talk on new book, Carl Zimmer theorizes key researcher’s discoveries were undercut by his personality In the “Great Man” theory of history, outsized personalities make things happen. But when it comes to public acceptance of the science behind airborne diseases, Carl Zimmer hypothesized, a boring and unpleasant personality may have slowed progress. Zimmer, the 2016 recipient of the Stephen Jay Gould Prize for his contributions to the public understanding of evolutionary science, did not set out to tell the story of one such person as he tracked our “long, slow, very difficult realization that the air around us is alive.” But in a recent talk about his new book, “Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe,” he kept returning to former Harvard researcher William Firth Wells. “Air has always...