Speaker

Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer

American science writer, New York Times columnist, and lecturer in science writing at Yale. The only person to have both a tapeworm and an asteroid named after him — a distinction that says something about the range of scientists who read his work.

Zimmer has written more than a dozen books spanning evolution (The Tangled Bank), heredity (She Has Her Mother’s Laugh), the definition of life (Life’s Edge), and most recently the history and science of airborne disease (Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, 2025). He is not a research scientist but an explanatory journalist — his craft is translating primary scientific literature and the scientists who produce it into prose accessible to a general reader without sacrificing precision.

Core positions

The air is not a void. Zimmer’s central argument in Air-Borne is that the scientific and public-health establishment spent a century actively suppressing what should have been an obvious insight: that living things in the air make us sick, and that the same air can be made safer by engineering. He traces the suppression to three causes — the miasma consensus that germ theory disrupted but did not replace clearly, the military capture of aerobiology during the Second World War (which classified foundational research and redirected it toward weapons), and the institutional inertia of public health agencies that had built their protocols around non-aerial transmission routes.

On genetics and heredity, Zimmer is empirically respectful — heritability estimates are real — but historically cautious: he regards the early-twentieth-century history of eugenics as the natural endpoint of confident extrapolation from population-level correlations to individual decisions, and applies that caution directly to proposals for genetic screening in hiring or admissions. On the definition of life and the prospects for extraterrestrial biology, he holds that the aerobiome (the community of living organisms that travel through the air) extends the question of where life can persist — including, possibly, the cloud layers of Venus.

In the wiki