Pasteur Saw That “Germs Were Everywhere in the Air”

The passages quoted below show how Pasteur respected his audience by finding a clear and compelling way to communicate that “germs” float in the air. The essay quoted below is adapted from Zimmer’s recently released Air-Borne book.

In other parts of Air-Borne, Zimmer discusses how the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. ignored the implications of the findings of Pasteur and others, relevant to the air-borne (aerosol) spread of diseases such as Covid-19.

(p. D8) On the evening of April 7, 1864, in an amphitheater filled with Parisian elites, Pasteur stood surrounded by lab equipment and a lamp to project images on a screen. He told the audience it would not leave the soiree without recognizing that the air was rife with invisible germs. “We can’t see them now, for the same reason that, in broad daylight, we can’t see the stars,” he said.

At Pasteur’s command, the lights went out, save for a cone of light that revealed floating motes of dust. Pasteur asked the audience to picture a rain of dust falling on every surface in the amphitheater. That dust, he said, was alive.

Pasteur then used a pump to drive air through a sterile piece of cotton. After soaking the cotton in water, he put a drop under a microscope. He projected its image on a screen for the audience to see. Alongside soot and bits of plaster, they could make out squirming corpuscles. “These, gentlemen, are the germs of microscopic beings,” Pasteur said.

Germs were everywhere in the air, he said — kicked up in dust, taking flights of unknown distances and then settling back to the ground, where they worked their magic of fermentation. Germs broke down “everything on the surface of this globe which once had life, in the general economy of creation,” Pasteur said.

“This role is immense, marvelous, positively moving,” he added.

The lecture ended with a standing ovation. Pasteur’s hunt for floating germs elevated him to the highest ranks of French science.

For the full essay see:

Zimmer, Carl. “He Showed That Germs Floated in Air.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 18, 2025): D8.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay was updated Feb. 18, 2025, and has the title “Louis Pasteur’s Relentless Hunt for Germs Floating in the Air.”)

Zimmer’s essay, quoted above, is adapted from his book:

Zimmer, Carl. Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. New York: Dutton, 2025.

Alternatives to Government F.D.A.: Private “High-Quality Third-Party Seals of Approval”

The many label inaccuracies found in the “2022 study” (Crawford et al. 2022) mentioned below would seem to bode ill for the supplement consumer. But if you look at the “new study” you will find that NONE of the 30 supplements they examined had “a third-party certification seal.” This leaves open the plausible possibility that prudent consumers could do well for themselves by limiting their supplement purchases to those with a private third-party certification seal. It would be very useful if someone does another study–this one to confirm or refute my hypothesis that supplements with third-party certification seals had many fewer label inaccuracies. Confirmation would be evidence that the consumer could do well without the F.D.A.’s governmental regulatory mandates.

The relevant quotation from the “2022 study” (Crawford et al. 2022) is:

“No product had a third-party certification seal (ie, naming the third-party company), such as BSCG (Banned Substances Control Group), NSF (National Sanitation Foundation)International, Informed Sport, or USP (US Pharmacopeia), presented on the label” (Crawford et al. 2022, pp. 3 & 5 [all of p. 4 was a table]).”

(p. D7) Supplements claiming to support immunity often contain vitamins and minerals necessary for the immune system. So it isn’t unreasonable to believe that these products could help you sidestep common viral infections or lessen symptoms once you’ve become sick.

In fact, some nutrients such as vitamins A, C, D and zinc are needed to protect against germs, and deficiencies in them raise your risk of becoming sick, said Dr. Mahtab Jafari, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

. . .

It’s hard to firmly state the benefits of immune system supplements because there are few high-quality randomized clinical trials, the gold standard of medical research, assessing their effectiveness, said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who studies dietary supplement safety.

And dietary supplements aren’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration before hitting the market.

This means companies can sell products containing ingredients that haven’t been rigorously tested to offer benefits, Dr. Cohen said, and they generally don’t have to prove to the F.D.A. that their products contain what they claim.

A 2022 study analyzing 30 supplements marketed to support the immune system found that more than half had inaccurate labels, 13 were misbranded and nine contained ingredients not listed on the label.

. . .

“You need to have a really healthy dose of skepticism when you’re pulling something off the shelf,” Dr. Ben-Aderet said.

But if you want to give supplements a try, check for high-quality third-party seals of approval from organizations such as U.S. Pharmacopeia or NSF, which test the quality of dietary supplements, Dr. Jafari said.

For the full story see:

Katie Mogg. “Supplements and Claims of Improved Immunity.” The New York Times (Tuesday, February 25, 2025): D7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 3, 2025, and has the title “Can Vitamin C and Zinc Actually Boost Your Immune System?”)

The “2022 study” mentioned above is:

Crawford, Cindy, Bharathi Avula, Andrea T. Lindsey, Abraham Walter, Kumar Katragunta, Ikhlas A. Khan, and Patricia A. Deuster. “Analysis of Select Dietary Supplement Products Marketed to Support or Boost the Immune System.” JAMA Network Open 5, no. 8 (2022): e2226040-e40.

Signed Anti-Tariff Declaration and Would LIKE to Sign PRO-Deregulation and PRO-Government-Downsizing Declarations

My friend Tom Chappelear posted a response to my posting, and I responded:

You may be right, but I am inclined otherwise. How much of the off-shoring is due to other countries’ protectionist policies, and how much is due to the U.S. over-regulating manufacturing, so that labor is cheaper and more flexible abroad? I disagree with Oren Cass’s support for protectionism and industrial policy, but I found his chapter on environmental regulations eye-opening. Ever-more-onerous environmental regulations don’t do anything to make the air and water healthier, but do a lot to make manufacturing in the U.S. more expensive and less nimbly adaptive. Our labor regulations also make it much harder for U.S. entrepreneurs to hire U.S. laborers, and to deploy them in innovative ways.

“Effort Means That You Care About Something”

In my Openness book, I argue that we should allow each other the freedom to choose intensity over work-life balance. David Brooks is sometimes thought-provoking and eloquent, for instance in the passages quoted below where he defends intensity.

One question that Brooks discusses elsewhere in his essay is: how do you find your “passion,” your “misery,” your “vocation”? He tries but after reading his answers, I think the mystery mostly remains. The best answer to this question that I have found is in a book by John Chisholm called Unleash Your Inner Company. Chishom suggests that you should apply yourself to something worth doing, and work to do it better. If you do that, he suggests, you are likely to eventually find you increasingly care about what you are doing.

(p. 9) My own chosen form of misery is writing. Of course, this is now how I make a living, so I’m earning extrinsic rewards by writing. But I wrote before money was involved, and I’m sure I’ll write after, and the money itself isn’t sufficient motivation.

Every morning, seven days a week, I wake up and trudge immediately to my office and churn out my 1,200 words — the same daily routine for over 40 years. I don’t enjoy writing. It’s hard and anxiety-filled most of the time. Just figuring out the right structure for a piece is incredibly difficult and gets no easier with experience.

I don’t like to write but I want to write. Getting up and trudging into that office is just what I do. It’s the daily activity that gives structure and meaning to life. I don’t enjoy it, but I care about it.

We sometimes think humans operate by a hedonic or utilitarian logic. We seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We seek activities with low costs and high rewards. Effort is hard, so we try to reduce the amount of effort we have to put into things — including, often enough, the effort of thinking things through.

And I think we do operate by that kind of logic a lot of the time — just not when it comes to the most important things in our lives. When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.

. . .

. . . I have found that paradoxically life goes more smoothly when you take on difficulties rather than try to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid quests more stress often leads to more satisfaction, at least until you get to the highest levels. The psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote: “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

All this toil is not really about a marathon or a newspaper article or a well-stocked shelf at the grocery store. It’s about slowly molding yourself into the strong person you want to be. It’s to expand yourself through challenge, steel yourself through discipline and grow in understanding, capacity and grace. The greatest achievement is the person you become via the ardor of the journey.

. . .

So, sure, on a shallow level we lead our lives on the axis of pleasure and pain. But at the deeper level, we live on the axis between intensity and drift. Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.

For the full commentary see:

David Brooks. “A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sun., March 30, 2025): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 27, 2025, and has the same title as the print version. The first couple of paragraphs quoted above appear in the longer online version, but not in the shorter print version, of the commentary. In the third quoted paragraph, the words “like” and “want” are italicized.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The book by Chisholm that I praise in my initial comments is:

Chisholm, John. Unleash Your Inner Company: Use Passion and Perseverance to Build Your Ideal Business. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2015.

Animals Consume Effective Medicines Without Spending Billions on Phase 3 Clinical Trials

Animals are free to self-medicate and apparently often do so effectively. Isn’t it ironic that our government F.D.A. restricts the freedom of humans to self-medicate?

(p. A13) . . . as Jaap de Roode reveals in “Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves,” many animals seek out substances to relieve illnesses or battle parasites that drag their health down: . . .

Mr. de Roode, a biology professor at Emory University, chronicles animal self-medication in everything from caterpillars and bees to pigs and dolphins. The drugs take the form of minerals, fungi and especially plants. Often, the drug is ingested for therapeutic reasons, as when chimps eat Velcro-like leaves to scour parasitic worms from their intestines. Many creatures also take drugs prophylactically, to prevent disease. The feline love of catnip, Mr. de Roode suggests, is probably an evolutionary adaptation: The plant deters disease-carrying mosquitoes, so cats with a taste for it ended up more equipped for survival.

. . .

Many plants produce chemicals called alkaloids that taste foul and cause other unpleasant sensations, but can also fight off parasites. After noticing that woolly bear caterpillars infested with fly maggots tend to seek out alkaloid-rich plants, scientists documented—by threading tiny wires into the caterpillars’ mouths—that the infected critters’ taste buds fired far more often when eating these plants than did the taste buds of the uninfected. The bugs’ sensory perception changed to make drugs more attractive. If the consumption of some irregular substance leads to a drop in infection load and alleviates negative symptoms, then, Mr. de Roode convincingly argues, animals are indeed using medicine. Caterpillar, heal thyself.

. . .

Humans can benefit from studying animal medicine, too. Most of our drugs are either plant compounds or derived from plant compounds. But researchers have systematically studied only a few hundred of the earth’s estimated tens of thousands of plant species. To guide researchers’ studies, scientists could note which ones animals consume and concentrate on those. Let Mother Nature do the research and development for us.

For the full review see:

Sam Kean. “Bookshelf; Medicinal Kingdom.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 28, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 27, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Doctors by Nature’: Medicinal Kingdom.”)

The book under review is:

Roode, Jaap de. Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

New York Times Cancels Pamela Paul–the Gutsy, Honest Defender of the Unfairly Canceled

The New York Times always leaned left, but would often present alternative viewpoints. In recent years the bias was strong and strident. But sometimes in the last several months I thought that I saw the dawning of a few more glimmers of fairness. A few of those glimmers came a couple of years ago when I first noticed the commentaries of Pamela Paul. She occasionally told stories that were true but were not politically correct. She occasionally defended those who had been unfairly cancelled. Sometimes I would finish one of her columns and feel hope in my heart for our society and even for The New York Times. (I ran blog entries highlighting Pamela Paul commentaries here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

But today I was catching up on some unread papers and read her “Farewell Column.” I immediately Googled her name and learned that she had been fired, canceled, by The New York Times. What a sad, sorry day. I hope she prospers somewhere else.

I will continue to subscribe to The New York Times for now. I still find enough value in niches as yet unruined by the Times‘s cancel culture: the Tuesday “Science Times” section, sometimes obituaries, sometimes business stories, and sometimes international stories (especially on China).

Here is little of what she wrote in “Farewell”:

(p. A23) I knew my positions, fundamentally liberal but often at odds with what had become illiberal progressive dogma, would ruffle feathers. But as I explained, “I want to write about that vast center/liberal space and to address what people really think and believe but are often too afraid to say.”

. . .

I did not want my positions to be unduly guided by what others might think, be they friends or strangers, office colleagues or online trolls, activist organizations or institutional powers. And the lure of affirmation can be just as potent as the fear of attack.

. . .

. . . the reporting I’m most proud of is when I used my voice to stand up for people whose lives or work had come under attack, whether they were public figures or were dragged into the public eye because they’d dared to speak or act in ways that unjustly elicited professional or social condemnation: A popular novelist ostracized for alleged “cultural appropriation.” A physician assistant who was excoriated on social media for standing up to bullies. A Palestinian writer whose appearance at a prominent book fair was canceled. An early beneficiary of affirmative action who dared to explore its unintended consequences. Vulnerable gay teenagers who described being misled by a politicized medical establishment into dubious gender transition treatments. A public university president who was driven away by a campus besieged with political division. Social work students and faculty members undermined by a school that had betrayed its own principles. A public health expert who risked opprobrium from his peers by calling out his profession on groupthink.

All found themselves at odds with the people or communities that had once supported them, a disorienting place to be, especially in these polarized times.

Pamela Paul’s last commentary for The New York Times is:

Pamela Paul. “My Farewell Column.” The New York Times (Fri., April 4, 2025): A23.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 3, and has the same title as the print version.)

New York Times Says Trump “Has Waged a Multipronged Assault at Regulations” on Environment

The passages quoted below are further evidence apropos my dialogue with my libertarian friends who argue that the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate and downsize have failed.

(p. 1) With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.

. . .

To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.

. . .

(p. 31) [Trump] has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.

. . .

The administration and Republicans in Congress plan to use a legislative maneuver to quickly erase California’s authority to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. That authority has never before been challenged in this way, and critics say the maneuver is illegal. But it would be much faster than trying to overturn the California ban through the standard process that requires months of public notice and comment.

“They’re doing all the things I thought they would do, and they’re doing other things that I only dreamed they might do,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who led the E.P.A. transition team during Mr. Trump’s first term.

. . .

And in a move that could have far-reaching implications for government efforts to regulate industry, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.

“We’re talking about undoing 50 years of environmental regulation and accelerating the extinction crisis and risking the health of the American people,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s so much shocking news every day. People are struggling to process all of it.”

. . .

Much of the damage to the country’s environmental regulatory apparatus may be long-lasting.

. . .

On Wednesday [Feb. 26, 2025] Trump said he believed Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would be cutting about 65 percent of the agency’s more than 17,000 jobs. Mr. Zeldin later said that he thought the E.PA. could cut at least 65 percent of its budget and make cuts to its work force.

For the full story see:

David Gelles, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer. “Undoing Years of Climate Policy in a Few Weeks.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 2, 2025): 1 & 31.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name and date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 2, 2025, and has the title “‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy.”)

Breakthrough Innovations Often Reach Success Through Incremental Improvements

After 130 days, the patient with the longest (so far) transplant of a pig kidney decided to have the transplant “explanted” and return to dialysis. Her surgeon explained that this should not be viewed as a failure of the basic innovation. The patient had the option to continue improvisations to keep the pig kidney alive, but decided that for her the risks had become too high.

The surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery said:

“All this takes time,” he said. “This game is going to be won by incremental improvements, singles and doubles, not trying to swing for the fences and get a home run.” (p. A24)

The pig kidney transplants follow the pattern of many other medical innovations, where on-the-fly adjustments, when the protocol allows them, lead to longer duration successes with fewer side effects. Emil Freireich found this with his chemo cocktails for childhood leukemia. Early human heart transplants also followed this pattern.

We should not allow early setbacks to push us to overregulate the incremental progress that can eventually leads to success.

My source is:

Roni Caryn Rabin. “Pig Kidney Is Removed From an Alabama Woman After Organ Is Rejected.” The New York Times (Sat., April 12, 2025): A24.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 11, 2025, and has the title “Pig Kidney Removed From Alabama Woman After Organ Rejection.”)

90% of Biomedical Articles Are “Either Misleading, Wrong or Completely Fabricated”

The right to health freedom is primarily an ethical issue. But the uncertainty and unreliability of much medical “knowledge” (as argued in the book reviewed in the passages quoted below) seems to strengthen the case for patient self-determination.

(p. A15) The largest repositories of biomedical research in the U.S. and Europe, PubMed and Europe PMC, contain 84 million articles between them, and add a million more each year. According to recent estimates, up to 90% of those papers—75 million total—contain information that’s either misleading, wrong or completely fabricated.

Over the past 20 years, certain branches of science have endured a so-called reproducibility crisis, in which countless papers have been exposed as shoddy if not bogus. Sometimes these revelations are merely embarrassing, but in biomedical research, incorrect publications can cost lives as doctors and drugmakers rely on them to treat patients.

In “Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research,” Csaba Szabo—a physician with doctorates in physiology and pharmacology—dissects the ways he’s seen research go wrong in his 30 years in academia and industry: data manipulation, poor experimental design, statistical errors and more.

. . .

The biggest problem, however, lies with scientists who strive to do good work but feel pressured to cut corners. Scientists cannot work without grant money, but of the 70,000 applications the National Institutes of Health receive each year, only 20% get funded. Leading journals reject up to 99% of papers submitted, and only one in 200 doctoral graduates ever becomes a full professor. Even with tenure, professors can suffer salary cuts or have their labs handed to higher-performing colleagues if they don’t keep pulling in cash. Some sadistic research professors even pit their graduate students against each other in “dogfights”—they run the same experiment, but only the first to get results publishes. No wonder researchers massage data or fudge images: Forget “publish or perish.” It’s “fib or forgo your career.”

. . .

Given this tsunami of mistakes, the author points out that cynical types have suggested we treat all biomedical research as fraudulent unless proved otherwise. The cost is staggering: The U.S. wastes tens of billions of dollars annually on useless research, shortening or even costing patient lives. Most scientists can’t even reproduce their own data half the time, and the number of papers retracted rose to 10,000 in 2023 from 500 in 2010.

. . .

Most importantly, Dr. Szabo calls for systematic changes in how science gets done.

. . .

Above all, he despises the broken status quo, where “everybody acts politely . . . keeps their mouths shut, and acts like the whole process is functioning perfectly well.”

For the full review see:

Sam Kean. “Bookshelf; Reaching For Results.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 24, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis internal to paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated March 24, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Unreliable’: Reaching for Results.”)

The book under review is:

Szabo, Csaba. Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research. New York: Columbia University Press, 2025.

Trump Deregulates Biden’s Logging and Mining Bans on Public Lands

Trump’s agriculture secretary announced the deregulation of logging on 113 million acres of public lands–logging is now allowed on those lands. The Agriculture Department also announced the deregulation of mining on 264,000 acres of public lands, in order to “boost production of critical minerals” (p. A19).

Source:

Lisa Friedman. “White House Reverses Biden Limits on Drilling and Mining on Public Lands.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 10, 2025): A19.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 8, 2025, and has the title “Trump Administration Opens More Public Land to Drilling and Mining.”)

How a Progressive, About to Pretend to Be a Conservative, Dropped the Pretense

How does a person totally change from one viewpoint to a totally different viewpoint? A thought-provoking case study was presented in a full page article in The New York Times.

In 2020 Xaviaer DuRousseau was a black progressive scheduled to appear on “The Circle,” a Netflix reality contest show in which his role was to sometimes attempt to fool the other participants into thinking that he was a conservative. To prepare himself to effectively deceive, he started studying conservative popular media, including the video clips of PragerU and of black social media pundit Candace Owens.

As he worked through the arguments he planned to make as a faux conservative on “The Circle,” he gradually realized that he was more and more agreeing with them, and eventually could no longer honestly be a “faux” conservative. So DuRousseau dropped the “faux” and resigned from the Netflix show.

Now Xaviaer DuRousseau is a full-fledged conservative, himself making popular videos for PragerU.

A surprising story in a surprising venue.

The full-page article in The New York Times is:

Kellen Browning and Mark Abramson. “How a Black Progressive Became a Conservative Star.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 10, 2025): A12.

(Note: the online version of the article was updated April 3, 2025, and has the title “How a Black Progressive Transformed Into a Conservative Star.”)