lost in the fog of a cosmic storm floating on
whimsical wavelengths is the norm dancing through
the stars chasing spectrums of light riding the
waves that are just out Before modern medical
science existed, as much as 50 % of Europe's
14th century population died due to the Black
Death. Yes, yes, I know. It's a dark way to start
a whimsical Wavelengths episode. This is also
a solo episode. This episode is inspired by a
listener. That should be a cue for any of you
out there that have an idea or something you
want to hear more of on the show to reach out.
And this particular listener wanted more ammunition
to frame discussions and push back against those
who play fast and loose with reality. In season
one, we did a bit of this with Nikola Tesla and
HARP, the High Arctic Auroral Research Program.
And we've also had many episodes which add little
tidbits about the sausage making of science,
which are super important to understand everything.
If one understands the complexities of scientific
methods and the instruments and institutions
we use to conduct it, It changes your perception.
For example, in the same way that vaccines, if
you understand science, become one of humans'
greatest inventions, climate change stops being
political and starts being something physical.
They're observable truths. My dear listener,
Robin, described the need for information in
a more general way, but gave the example of vaccines.
First, I thought from Star Trek, I'm a geophysicist
and volcanologist, not an MD, damn it. But I
understand science and its methodology. I figured
I could go out and approach this from a historical
viewpoint and how we ended up in the position
we're in. In other words, spin you a whimsical
yarn. It's actually crazy when we get down to
it and look at it that the opposition to disease
intervention didn't begin with vaccines. You
could argue it began with varulation. And we'll
come back to that later. This is where they infect
people with a milder version of the disease.
I should also mention that throughout this episode,
I'm going to be butchering people's names and
other scientific terms and the way they're pronounced.
I'm going to give it my best shot, but I'm human
and this isn't AI voice. What can I say? I have
the face for radio. So while we'll come back
to variolation, there's even an earlier belief
that disease was not something humans should
interfere with. Like it was divine will. Like
so many of these things, they hearken back to...
the distant past. They're reactionary in an effort
to disbelieve something in the present or to
explain something in the present in a more, I
don't know what the word is, relatable way. But
before we get into all of this, there's some
ground rules because this episode is health related.
Number one, I am not your doctor. this is not
medical advice well it is likely that a vaccine
will be a net benefit to you there are cases
when that is not true due to allergic reactions
of ingredients inside the vaccine like eggs for
instance or those that are immunocompromised
like you're going undergoing cancer treatment
when these vaccines are taken on a population
scale when we remove the individual which may
or may not have a good reason to not take a vaccine,
when we take them on a population scale, i .e.
everyone who should take it, it can wipe out
or severely reduce the amount of sickness that
is in the public. It's an evolutionary arms race
out there, and vaccines are an important tool
to give us the upper hand. This episode does
not constitute medical advice, as I already said.
This isn't a debate episode. It's a walkthrough
of how the evidence has accumulated. and which
ideas survived contact with reality. So, as a
couple of these solo episodes have already gone
down this path in rabbit holes, it's really about
the history of science, the observations, the
repeatable data, the experiments, and how we
got from then to today. If we don't understand
the past, it's damn difficult to understand the
present. This time, we don't need to go all the
way back to the Roman Empire in antiquity to
start my whimsical tale. Today, we're going to
start with the Black Death and its hindsight
observations, and then pivot to the old ideas
of disease and the data that led up to germ theory,
and an idea that says disease isn't caused by
microbes at all, but by the condition of the
body itself. The Black Death. Why start the story
here? Well, because. It represents a pathogen
before any semblance of modern understanding.
It was well written about. We have lots of records
about it. And there was no microscopes. Bacteria
wasn't yet discovered. And infection wasn't really
a concept. The Black Death represented something
terrible. People dying from something no one
understood. Getting sick in medieval times was
thought of in several different ways. The most
common was divine punishment or divine will.
specifically with the Black Death, people would
whip themselves or fast, hoping for God's forgiveness.
There were other darker things done too, like
pointing at minorities and persecuting them because
they believed it must be their fault. I purposely
did not go too far in this vein during my research,
in part perhaps for my own sanity. Today or any
other time in human history, humans can be terrible.
To other humans. For the ideas of fasting, while
the body is weakened by it, you're not getting
the nutrients you need when dealing with disease.
Not exactly useful. That's not to say that fasting
can't be good for you under the right circumstances,
but that's not today's episode. Causing bodily
damage to oneself, looking for salvation, like
where you see, particularly if you... have watched
the holy grail from monty python and there will
be at least one more call out to that show as
we move along where doremniacrine and they whip
themselves well that's that process of looking
for salvation and really it's just making bacterial
infection easier you're creating open wounds
yeah not good and the persecuting others through
violence and massacres and terror of course that
doesn't help you get the picture But the Black
Death was a terrible time. Governments were failing.
Religious institutions were failing. People were
willing to turn to anything, including astrology,
which is also a turn back to the alignment of
the stars, a call out to the last solo episode.
Basically, the occult and the supernatural. We
still see this today in Western culture. The
most scientific explanation at the time was miasma
or bad air. here the idea goes if the air is
bad you get sick which is some truth to it when
london finally got sewers to deal with the stink
to take away all the bad air cholera cases went
way down as much less contamination with all
sewage and you know all that nastiness was removed
one other example of miasma or how it was used
to explain observations is swamps they often
smell different It's also where mosquitoes are
at their highest concentration. Move away from
those swamps and there's less mosquitoes. There's
less malaria, less bad smell. Maybe this is another
point where we should make the case that correlation
does not always equal causation. Okay, so I've
seen a reference in the research to a plague
doctor mask as well in reference to miasma and
the black death. The bird -like beak that is
shown in popular costumes. I could have done
a whole episode on the masks and their origins,
but that's not very on -brand for whimsical wavelengths.
But it does seem like they came about in the
mid -1600s during another cycle of the plague
or Black Death. There at least is some discussion
of them out there that the idea of the beak could
hold nice -smelling things and remove the bad
air and therefore protect those caring for the
sick. History and humans are definitely strange.
Today, we do know what caused the Black Death.
Yersinia pestis, a bacteria, a hyperparasite,
which means it's a parasite and its host is a
parasite. So primarily, if you wanted to describe
it a different way, it's a parasite of a parasite.
Typically, Yersinia pestis infects fleas feeding
off of what they would eat from their hosts,
who in this case are rats. Keep in mind... At
this point in our story, people being infected
had no idea of any of this. Okay, let's go on
a bit of a tangent here. We're going to do this
multiple times throughout this whimsical story.
A side story, if you will. Understanding this
pathogen goes a long way to understanding history.
The first time it spread across Europe was between
541 AD and 750 AD, during the reign of the Byzantine
emperor Justinian I, who contracted it in...
542 AD and survived. So that's how the plague
got its name at the time. It killed up to 25
% of Europe's population. It was also a point
in history when the Byzantine Empire was growing,
trying to restore the Roman Empire. Maybe they
would have succeeded if not for the fact that
the plague weakened them. Understanding Yersinai
Pestis' spread, is a scientific sleuthing game
and it has big effects on how we understand history
back into the story at hand and in the same vein
an interesting observation or pattern kind of
emerges when you start looking at all the data
from behind the black death stable hands horse
handlers and some rural workers that worked with
cows seemed to fare slightly better during outbreaks
through the many waves of disease that rolled
through europe Now, before we go and get too
excited or go down a rabbit hole, better doesn't
necessarily mean safe. It doesn't mean immune.
It definitely doesn't mean protected in any modern
sense when we start talking about vaccines. These
people still, many of them got sick. Many still
died. The Black Death was catastrophic across
all classes and professions, rich and poor. But
when historians and epidemiologists go back through
the record, like burial counts and documents,
there is a signal there. Certain groups, especially
those working closely with large animals like
horses and cows, had slightly lower mortality
rates comparison to others, like the densely
packed urban population. At the time, nobody
knew why. It wasn't a theory. It wasn't even
medicine when these observations were first made.
It wasn't even really science as we'd recognize
it. It was simply pattern recognition, lived
experience and hindsight reconstruction. So what
was the possible cause? Well, chances are they
were exposed to something that increased their
chances of survival. A specific pathogen. And
those pathogens are the evolutionary cousins
or ancestors to the plague bacteria, Yersinia
pestis. See, the plague bacteria is actually
a fairly recent newcomer. Based on the estimates
on how fast genetics change, we think Yersinia
pestis emerged around 6 ,000 years ago. It evolved
from what we call today Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.
Their genetic code is extremely similar. In fact,
up to 95 % similar. and urinary pseudotuberculosis
is present in soil, water, and animal waste,
and would have existed all across Europe at the
time. If one eats contaminated food with this
bacteria, it can cause a mild, short -term, food
-borne illness. In other words, everyone who
dealt with livestock would have been exposed.
That exposure may be the reason more in rural
communities had better outcomes. Episodic exposure
to a similar -looking pathogen allows the immune
system to mount a at least a faster response,
increasing the survival chance. Remember, no
100 % here, but enough to change probabilities
at the margins when half the continent is flipping
dying. So two broad ways of thinking began taking
shape, even if no one at the time would have
described them that way. If you lived through
the Black Death, you absolutely saw that nutrition,
stress, housing, poverty affects who lives and
dies. That part is undeniable. Today, you perhaps
would call this the social economic determinants
of health. But you also see waves of illness
sweeping through towns, following trade routes,
moving along rivers, and strike people who were
perfectly healthy just days earlier. The problem
is, without tools, many explanations can be made
to fit the same observations. And that's where
we are, historically, at the end of the Black
Death. A world full of observations, suffering,
and patterns. But still missing one thing that
science requires before it can really begin to
work. A way to isolate cause from coincidence.
Of course, I'm skipping so much. That's what
happens every time you want to do a bit of a
scientific deep dive through history. So one
of the things I'm skipping is really getting
into how the Black Death during medieval time
also changed the social fabric of Europe, effectively
breaking serfdom. which was the way people were
organized. I am your king. Listen, strange women
lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis
for a system of government. But we're here right
now looking for a rough historical tale of how
we get to vaccines. The next observation that
is needed deals with other diseases. And one
of those observations is like survivors. They
often don't get sick. again from the same thing.
Smallpox, for the time, is one of the most obvious
examples. If you survived it once, the odds of
catching it again were pretty close to zero.
Measles behaved similarly. Entire communities
noticed that recovered individuals could care
for the sick without falling ill themselves.
That's a data point. Immunity or resistance happened
during the Black Death too. Hard -earned immunity.
Those that got sick and survived the immune system
remembers when new waves of the plague came through
many of those that survived did not get sick
a second time another pattern is clustering disease
follows ships trade routes armies it moves through
households it respects proximity far more than
it does astrology The alignment of stars in the
sky. This leads to early interventions like quarantine.
Venice's 40 -day isolation policy, the quarantina.
It wasn't based on biology, but it was based
on observation. Hold ships offshore and fewer
people died. It was picked specifically at the
number 40 because 40 is referenced in the Bible.
It reigned for 40 days and 40 nights. It was
not chosen based on observations or any real
sort of understanding. It was a decision made
in part to assert control over the situation.
And if you're going to assert control over the
situation at this time frame, you needed to couch
it or have some way to point back to something
that people did understand. And the Bible was
one of those things. However, looking back, the
outcome was measurable. It was a correct action
for incorrect reasons. Even those of learned
persuasions couldn't understand much of anything.
Because at this stage, only the effects are visible.
To identify a cause, you need to see the agent.
And now we get to the same similar discussion
as we did for telescopes. For most of human history,
being able to see bacteria were physically impossible.
Most disease -causing bacteria are on the order
of one micrometer in size. One thousandth of
a millimeter. Yersinia pestis, that bacterium
responsible for the plague, is roughly one to
two micrometers long. To resolve something that
small with visible light, you need magnifications
of around 400 to 1 ,000 times with good lenses
and minimal distortions. Early microscopes just
simply couldn't do that. Anton van Leeuwenhoek,
he was working in the late 1600s and famously
observed what he called amicals using handcrafted
single lens microscopes, reaching perhaps 200
to 300 times magnification. He absolutely saw
bacteria, but he couldn't distinguish species
or trace causality or connect them to a disease.
in a reproducible way also at a certain point
resolution matters more than magnification early
lenses suffered from severe optical aberrations
images were blurry distorted you could see motion
but not structure you couldn't reliably distinguish
one microorganism from another microscopes in
general improve slowly from the 1700s into the
1800s but still suffered from optical aberrations.
It's a bit like, okay, now we have the magnification.
I can see it, it's nice and big, but the image
is blurry. And that's kind of what I mean by
optical aberrations. It wasn't until the 1830s
and 1840s, with advances in lens manufacturing
and illumination, that microscopes truly became
a consistent scientific instrument instead of
just the curiosities of the rich. And now, at
this time, it becomes realistic. possible to
see disease agents clearly enough to compare
cases. And even then, viruses remain completely
out of reach. Viruses are typically tens to hundreds
of nanometers across. So we're getting even smaller
and smaller. Nano, ten to the minus nine. Which
is an order of magnitude smaller than bacteria.
No optical microscope, no matter how perfect,
can resolve them. That leap has to wait until
the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s.
Until then, viral diseases could only be inferred
from their effects. Plague bacteria in particular
required one more technique to be added to the
mix. They required staining techniques and controlled
sampling to be able to be identified, because
most bacteria are nearly transparent under visible
light. Even with good lenses, they don't naturally
stand out against the background of tissue, blood,
or fluid. So early microscopes just weren't fighting
poor resolution, they were fighting a contrast
problem. Stains, or dyes, solves this by chemically
binding color to specific structures in bacterial
cells, making them darker, more visible, and
more distinct from their surroundings. Different
strains attached differently to cell walls, membranes,
or internal components, allowing microbes to
be grouped, compared, and eventually classified.
But this required controlled sample preparation,
standardized dyes, and reproducible protocols.
And this didn't happen until the mid -1800s,
when bacteria became not just visible, but finally
identifiable. Only then does it become possible
to say this organism shows up consistently with
this disease, and it just doesn't show up at
all in healthy tissue. So while the optical measurements,
in this case the evidence we're improving, new
ideas are also hypothesis, or the philosophy
we're also emerging. Actually, if you go back
and take a look at all disciplines in science,
it's normal that humans seem to push the boundaries
before we can realistically detect or find evidence.
The heliocentric model, hearkening back to the
previous solo episode, is one example. If I wanted
to take one from geology, I could use continental
drift. A more modern idea would be general relativity,
where black holes and gravitational waves were
essentially predicted from a mathematical framework
and then only more recently found. So going back
actually quite a long ways, which is kind of
surprising. In the 1500s, proposed that diseases
are caused by transferable seeds. An idea centuries
ahead of its tools in time. At the same time,
another major conceptual roadblock had to fall.
The idea of spontaneous generation. The idea
that life could arise from non -living matter.
Maggots, for instance, just kind of showing up
on rotting meat. Microbes or... spoilage of stagnant
broth. And this idea that you could get life
just spontaneously dominated for centuries. The
same researcher that first really described bacteria
in microscope, Lin -Wen Hock, himself argued
that life only comes from life. But it wasn't
until the 1700s that you could kind of test this
experimentally. In 1765, lazaro balazzani boiled
broth and sealed it showing that no microorganisms
appeared unless new ones were introduced that
quietly undermined the idea that microbes were
simply materializing out of nothing before anyone
could name a bacteria or sketch a virus people
were already running these crude remarkably insightful
experiments on disease They didn't call it immunology
or controlled exposure. They just noticed patterns
and pushed on them. And we're going to come back
to smallpox. It's where one of those patterns
just became impossible to ignore. And I've already
mentioned that once you got smallpox, you didn't
get it twice usually. And really, when you start
looking at time in the 1600s and 1700s, this
virus was a relentless killer across Europe,
Asia, and beyond, taking out approximately a
third of those infected. It was predictable in
the way the Black Death wasn't. The plague felt
chaotic. Some people in crowded cities died.
Others survived. And to many observers, it looked
like fate or divine will or constitution. Smallpox
added another layer to that story. People noticed
something very specific. If you survived it,
you didn't get it again. That wasn't a vibe or
a belief. It was a reproducible observation.
The core of the scientific method. Survival came
with durable consequence. immunity. And even
hinted, even in the 1600s, that the body could
remember an infection. So shortly after that,
us humans got a whole lot bolder. Someone came
up with virulation. See, by the late 1600s, early
1700s, several cultures, including China, India,
and the Ottoman Empire, had developed a practice
called virulation. It reached England in about
1721. The idea was both simple and, quite frankly,
terrifying. It would take the material from somebody
with an active smallpox infection, often dried
scabs or pus, talk about gross, and introduce
it into a healthy person, usually through a small
cut in the skin, or you would breathe in dried
powdery scabs. Yeah, talk about gross. Really
gross. Besides the grossness, the whole thing
to me is just crazy. Because people at the time
didn't understand anything about smallpox. They
couldn't isolate the cause. They couldn't see
it. There's no germ theory yet, and we'll get
to that in just a few moments. I don't even...
What's the proper analogy? Okay, so I had to
go looking for a proper analogy. And after some
searching, maybe, maybe scurvy? In that particular
case, as another aside, a physician, James Lind,
conducted experiment in 1747, considered one
of the first controlled clinical trials in medical
history. He took 12 sailors with scurvy and divided
them into pairs, giving each a different treatment.
Only the pair given oranges and lemons recovered
quickly and dramatically. Well, it did take a
couple decades for it to be mandated as part
of the rations for the Brits and the Britons
on long voyages. It did when it was. It gave
them a significant advantage. Healthier crews.
It helped make them a naval superpower. And this
was well before we knew what vitamin C was, how
it helped the body. It's also the reason British
sailors, and then eventually all of the Britons,
got the nickname Lymies. Okay, so back to virulation
and smallpox. No one could reliably predict a
mild case in the modern sense. What they did
have was experience. Some patients seemed to
have less severe disease. And practitioners preferentially
used material from those cases to infect others.
It was empirical, but not mechanistic, meaning
they didn't understand the cause. But it was
still a deliberate choice. controlled exposure
instead of waiting for random exposure. And this
is perhaps the craziest part. The numbers were
stark. Nactual smallpox killed about, you know,
one in three, as I said, about 30 % of those
infected. Virulation brought that risk down to
about 1 % to 2%. That's crazy. It's still a terrifying,
gross gamble if you're the person being infected
or virulated, but at a population level, it was
a massive improvement. From there we get what
I would call the first vaccine. And the craziest
thing of all, the first vaccine came about before
we get a true modern understanding of disease.
And this, I cannot stress it enough, is wild
to me. It's just crazy. It's so amazing what
humans can put together and make as far as leaps
of logic. We are quite clever and amazing. Cowpox.
It birthed vaccination. You see, moving towards
the late 1700s, a pattern emerged from the countryside
of what today is the United Kingdom. Dairy workers
who caught cowpox, a mild blistering disease
from cows, seemed to be protected from smallpox.
This wasn't a one -off anecdote. It was a repeated
observation across farms and villages. People
who had cowpox scars did not get smallpox. In
1796, Edward Jenner decided to test this directly.
He took material from a cowpox lesion, which
is like a sore, on a milkmaid's hand and oculated
a young boy. The boy got sick with cowpox, recovered,
and then Jenner later exposed him to smallpox.
No disease. Jenner repeated this with more people.
Same result. This is the birth of vaccination.
And you can even look at the word vac. Vaca is
from Latin for cow. Vaccination takes its name
from cows. I'm pretty sure there is a Gary Larson
cartoon in there somewhere. And yes, I'm going
to continue to date myself with my pop culture
references. Sorry, not sorry. At the risk of
sounding like a broken record or skipping record,
if you will, all of this happened before anyone
had a formal theory of germs. No one knew what
a virus was. No one had ever seen a Viron. And
yet they figured out that the exposure to one
disease cowpox protected against another. And
that protection was durable. It didn't depend
on wealth or personality or moral character or
how healthy or unhealthy someone was. And when
we get down to it, what a vaccine really is,
if we strip away all that modern jargon, a vaccine
is just this. A vaccine is a controlled, safer
exposure that trains the immune system without
making you pay the full cost of the disease.
If you wanted to explain it a little bit more,
it's like a rehearsal instead of a catastrophe.
You give the body a preview of the threat, just
enough to learn from, so that when the real thing
shows up, the response is fast and effective.
Now, when we get to the mid -1850s, things speed
up again, which coincides with improvements in
the microscopes and the staining techniques we
were talking earlier. Ignaz Mel Weiss, a medical
doctor, showed that hand washing reduces maternal
deaths even before anyone knows why. In 1854,
a cholera outbreak in London, the physician,
John Snow, no, no, not that type of John Snow,
this person actually really did exist, unlike
the one in Game of Thrones, did something quite
radical. He mapped disease cases, like a proper
epidemiologist, and traced water sources. He
showed that the cholera outbreak clustered around
the Broad Street pumped and declined when the
pump handle was removed. Snow didn't know about
vibrocholerae. He couldn't see the pathogen.
But he demonstrated that cholera behaved like
a transmissible agent carried by water, not bad
air. John Snow's work didn't immediately convince
everyone. The miasma theory was deeply entrenched.
But it added a crucial plank. Diseases followed
physical pathways. At the same time, others were
tightening the experimental screws. Louis Pasteur
showed in the 1850s and 1860s that microorganisms
caused fermentation and spoilage, and that sterilization
prevented it. So one example of sterilization
is boiling or heating something up. Joseph Lister
applied these ideas to surgery. and introduced
antiseptic techniques in the 1860s. Surgical
mortality rates dropped dramatically. By the
time Robert Koch identified the bacteria responsible
for anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera in the
1870s and 1880s, the groundwork had been laid
by decades of instrument improvement, careful
observations, and the methodological discipline.
This is not a sudden revolution, it was an accumulation.
However, you could say, once that happened, you
could argue it was a revolution. But it was built
on that slow drip, well, speeding up drip, of
observations and data. Patterns first, then tools,
then mechanisms. By the mid -1800s, science had
finally had enough resolution, both optical and
conceptual, to stop arguing about what disease
might be, and start asking what it was. Pasteur,
based on the observations of fermentation and
spoilage, argued passionately for what we now
know as germ theory. As a complete aside, just
before I move on, Pasteur is the person we've
honoured to make the word pasteurise. So germ
theory, specific microbes invade a healthy body
from the outside and cause specific diseases.
In other words, the baseline for our modern understanding.
We'll come back to this in just a moment. So
what was the opposite to what became our modern
understanding? Well, the competing idea was championed
by the researcher Bal Champ, called terrain theory.
It was not a fringe theory or concept at the
time. It was a well -respected scientific framework.
The core claim of terrain theory was simple,
yet profound. Microbes do not cause disease.
Instead... Disease arises when the terrain, i
.e. the body, the internal environment, becomes
unhealthy, weak, or unbalanced. In this view,
microbes were simply the scavengers, a consequence
of sickness, and not the cause. If the body was
strong, healthy, and nourished, a microbe could
not take hold. The terrain was everything. This
is crucial to emphasize. Terrain theory didn't
really deny that microbes existed. It denied
that they were the primary cause of sickness.
But Champ and his followers believed that those
tiny organisms were opportunistic, that they
were the cleanup crew that arrived after the
mess was already made. The debate was a genuine
scientific clash. And for a long time, many observations
seemed to side with the terrain theory. And it
was appealing, because it aligned perfectly with
everyday observations that people made about
life and death. The most compelling observation
was simple. Not everyone exposed to a disease
got sick. During the outbreaks of cholera or
tuberculosis, physicians would note that some
people living in close, unsanitary quarters would
fall ill and die, while their neighbors remained
healthy. Terrain theory offered a clear answer.
The healthy neighbors had better terrain. We
can look back at the events like the Black Death
in the Middle Ages. The plague disproportionately
ravaged crowded, impoverished cities, where malnutrition,
constant stress, and poor living conditions amplified
mortality rates. To a medieval observer, it was
clear that poverty, crowding, and malnutrition
created fertile ground, the terrain, so to speak,
for the disease to flourish. So terrain theory
correctly identifies these aspects. A way to
think of it is like risk modifiers. It correctly
observed that your diet, stress level, hygiene,
and living conditions all matter immensely to
your health outcomes. However, terrain theory
makes a fundamental error in causation. The terrain
absolutely can determine if you get sick and
or how sick you get. but it is the microbe that
pulls the trigger, so to speak. And that is the
necessary initial cause of a specific illness.
The really strange thing is we know this. We
have all the data. It is viruses and bacteria
that get us sick. Terrain modifies the outcome.
The data is basically impeachable. However, given
the current state of things in North America,
I'm looking southward across the border with
the... Make America Healthy Again movement, this
M -A -H -A movement, is fixated on terrain. It
tries to shift the blame for one's sickness or
cancer or to the individual. I guess it can be
empowering to think that you have control over
all of this, but essentially, a modern movement
hung on an 1850s idea that doesn't even support
the data on its own. It is so strange. It actually
breaks my brain. It's also a common issue with
these quote -unquote ideas. Flat earthers often
invoke that gravity doesn't exist. It's all based
on density and buoyancy, which is an old idea
to explain gravity that doesn't work and doesn't
reproduce the data. As crazy as that seems, that
flat earth has similarities to the anti -vaccine
movements, it comes back to an idea that is incomplete.
It's almost like people need things to be simple
or they rebel. Their brain just kind of goes
poof. Can we blame education? Or maybe it's hidden
people pulling the strings. I don't know. So
before we kind of slowly move on, keeping in
mind that terrain absolutely matters. It does.
How healthy you are, how you eat, how you sleep
really does matter. Let's turn to the framework
that really spawned our modern understanding.
Germ theory. By the time Pasteur and Velkamp
were arguing their cases, the scientific world
finally had enough resolution. Microscope sharp
enough to see them, and the conceptual tools
sharp enough to test the ideas instead of just,
like, admiring them and talking about them philosophically.
And this is the moment where the debate stops
being all about those philosophies and becomes
empirical. Because germ theory didn't win. Just
because it was prettier or simpler. It won because
it made predictions that could be proved wrong.
Which is always at the heart of all scientific
methods. A scientific idea has to stick its neck
out there. It has to say, if I'm right, X should
happen. If I'm wrong, Y will. Germ theory did
that. Immediately. Train theory didn't or couldn't.
It explained outcomes after the fact. But it
didn't generate testable forecasts. Once Pasteur
and others proposed that specific microbes cause
specific diseases, the theory instantaneously
produced risky predictions. If a germ caused
infection, then removing germs should reduce
infection. And when surgeons sterilized instruments,
washed hands, and cleaned operating rooms, infection
rates didn't just dip, they collapsed. That is
not just based on philosophy. That's a controlled
variable producing a measured outcome. Germ theory
also predicted that preventing exposure should
prevent disease, even in people with wildly different
terrains. Vaccination is the clearest example.
If you prime the immune system before the pathogen
arrives, people shouldn't get sick. And across
continents, decades, and diseases, that prediction
held. Terrain theory had no comparable mechanism.
It couldn't say who would be protected or why.
It could only reinterpret the results afterwards.
Another prediction, if microbes spread between
people, then isolating infected individuals should
stop transmission. Regardless of their constitution,
diet, or stress level. And again, that's exactly
what happened. Quarantine worked in medieval
ports, in the 19th century hospitals, and in
modern outbreaks. I mean, just look at the COVID
-19 pandemic. The whole idea of staying home.
to bring down the total amount that is circulating
in the community. It works. You don't need to
know someone's terrain to understand why separating
them halts the chain of infection or transmission.
The mechanism is straightforward. No contact,
no transmission. Terrain theory, by contrast,
was unfalsible. If someone got sick, the terrain
was weak. If they didn't, the terrain was strong.
If two people were exposed and only one of them
fell ill, terrain theory could always retrofit
an explanation. That's not prediction. That's
narrative flexibility. This is where the engineering
mindset becomes a useful metaphor. Engineers
don't just describe systems. They change one
variable and watch what happens. If altering
a single input reliably shifts the output, you've
learned something real about causation. That's
how I done my science. Germ theory behaved just
like that too. Change the microbial load, change
the outcome. Change the exposure pathway, change
the outcome. Changed the immune priming. Changed
the outcome. By the time we reach the 1880s,
the world has changed. Jenner's cowpox vaccine
had been saving lives for nearly a century. Virulation
had faded. And the scientific community had finally
embraced germ theory, thanks to the work of Pasteur,
Koch, and others. It was caused by specific microbes
with specific life cycles. And that set the stage
for the first post -germ theory vaccine. The
one that finally united the mechanism with the
practice. We're talking about Pasteur's rabies
vaccine in 1885. This is a pretty cool story
because rabies is terrifying. See, unlike smallpox,
which was common and visible, rabies was rare,
but universally fatal once symptoms appeared.
It had a long incubation period, sometimes weeks,
sometimes months. That delay created... a scientific
opportunity. Maybe you could train the immune
system after exposure, before the virus had,
you know, fully gotten into your system, and
with our modern understanding, before it had
reached the brain. By 1879, Pasteur had already
shown that weakening a pathogen, what he called
attenuation, could produce immunity without causing
full -blown disease, first by an accident with
chicken cholera, then deliberately with anthrax.
He demonstrated that you could tame a microbe
just enough to train the immune system. That
insight is what made the rabies vaccine possible.
But rabies was different. No one had ever seen
a virus, and they were just too small for the
microscopes of the time. Yet germ theory gave
Pasteur the conceptual confidence, you know,
the guardrails, the understanding of how to proceed.
If rabies was caused by a microbe of some sort,
then it should be possible to weaken it. to control
it, and to use it to train the immune system.
Pasteur and his colleagues began passing the
rabies agent through a series of animals, especially
rabbits. Each passage changed the pathogen slightly.
By drying the infected spinal cords of these
animals for different lengths of time, they created
a gradient of weakened virus, from very mild
to the real McCoy. This was the first rational,
process -driven... Vaccine design in history.
Jenner stumbled onto cowpox by observations.
Pasteur was engineering immunity on purpose.
Then came the moment that forced the theory into
practice. In July 1885, a nine -year -old boy
named Joseph Meister was brought to Pasteur after
being severely bitten by a rabid dog. The boy
had multiple deep wounds. Without intervention,
he would almost certainly die. Pasteur wasn't
a physician, and he knew the ethical stakes,
but he also knew the science. The virus travels
slowly from the bite site into the nervous system
and into the brain. If he could train the immune
system fast enough, he might outrun the infection.
Over 10 days, Pasteur administered a series of
injections, starting with the most attenuated
material and gradually moving towards stronger
preparations. It was a controlled immunological
ramp. The stepwise rehearsal for the immune system.
And it worked. The kid never developed rabies.
This was the first time a vaccine had been used
therapeutically, not just to prevent disease
before exposure, but to stop a deadly infection
already underway. And it was also the first vaccine
designed with a, you know, a proper understanding
of microbes, attenuation, and immune priming.
Pasteur wasn't guessing. He was applying germ
theory directly. And this is where the contrast
with terrain theory becomes unavoidable. Terrain
theory couldn't explain why a weakened pathogen
would protect against a stronger one. It couldn't
explain why timing mattered, why attenuation
mattered, or why a series of graded exposures
could outrun a virus. Germ theory, on the other
hand, predicted all of this. If a disease is
caused by a replicating microbe, then a weakened
microbe can reduce disease, exposing the immune
system safely. induces protection. Intervene
early and you can beat the pathogen's replication
clock. Pasteur's rabies vaccine was the first
demonstration of these principles in action.
It also marked the beginning of modern vaccinology.
After 1885, vaccines were no longer accidents
of nature like cowpox, but engineered tools.
Scientists could now design them, weaken pathogens
intentionally, and tailor immune system responses.
The rabies vaccine wasn't just a medical triumph,
it was a conceptual one. It proved that once
you understood the cause of disease, you can
manipulate it, control it, and even sometimes
reverse it. If you zoom out and look at the history
of vaccines as like a time -lapse, it's astonishing
how quickly the field accelerates once germ theory
fully lands. The early steps from virulation
to Jenner's cowpox vaccine are, you know, before
we understood. They work. But no one knew why.
After 1850, everything changes. So let's do a
little bit of rapid fire, or at least more rapid,
I won't go into that much detail, of some of
the vaccines and milestones. As I already mentioned,
the first one was in 1885, the rabies vaccine.
In the 1890s, dipheria antitoxin. So this isn't
a vaccine yet, but it's a milestone. As researchers
show that the body produces specific factors
or antibodies that neutralize the toxins that
this particular bacteria makes. That's right,
they figure out that the body produces antibodies
that can bind and remove toxins. This discovery
becomes the conceptual backbone of immunology.
And then finally, 30 years later in the 1920s,
we get taxoid vaccines for diphtheria, which
we just mentioned in the 1890s, and tetanus.
Okay, I've got to admit, when I was going through
this, this one also surprised me. See, I am a
volcanologist geophysicist, and there's lots
I don't know, which is, again, the reason why
I love doing this podcast. So these vaccines
do not target the bacteria, diphera and tetanus
specifically. It targets the toxins of these
diseases, like tetanus, because tetanus is actually
caused by C. tetani, and when it replicates in
low -oxygen environments, it creates a neurotoxin,
and it is this neurotoxin that gets us sick.
So these vaccines use the toxin essentially in
the safe form so the body can recognize it, but
it doesn't actually get as sick. And it allows
the body to just figure it out and says, oh,
I know what this is. Bind it, create these toxoids
and remove it from the body. It chemically activates
the immune system to inactivate toxins. Wow.
If bacteria ever shows up in the body, the body
can just remove the toxins due to the immune
system figuring it out. Before they ever get
to the nervous system, in the case of tetanus,
this was a first major expansion of vaccine logic
beyond just weakening the pathogen because it
doesn't even target the pathogen directly. In
the 1940s, we ended up getting Petrusis and the
first combination vaccines, DTP, Deferia, Tetanus,
and Petrusis. This is the moment public health
vaccination becomes scalable. Instead of dozens
of injections, you get one. And uptake skyrockets.
In the 1950s, polio, which had gone into two
different strategies, both revolutionary. You
have Salk, which uses an inactivated virus, safe,
stable, injectable. And Sabin, which uses a live
attenuated oral vaccine, easy to administer,
gives excellent immunity. Together, they drive
polio to the brink of eradication. 1960s and
1980s, the viral vaccine boom. This era gives
us measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, hepatitis
B, and more. The key innovation in the growing
virus is in cell culture, allowing precise attenuation.
The MMR combination vaccine in 1971 becomes a
global public health cornerstone. In 1990s, conjugate
vaccines is the major leap for infinites, so
there are certain types of bacteria, which we
used to have sugar -coated capsules to get that
vaccine in, but young immune systems often couldn't
recognize the piece that we were adding to it
because of that sugar capsule. Conjugate vaccines
chemically link those sugars directly to a protein
flag, making them much more visible to the immune
system, which means... We can truly target young
immune systems for bacteria that causes things
like meningitis and sepsis. And their cases plummet.
In the 2000s, we had HPV and cancer prevention.
For the first time, a vaccine prevents cancer
by blocking the infection with onogenic HPV strains.
This reframes vaccines not as just a tool against
infectious disease directly, but as a long -term
disease prevention technology. And of course,
in this decade, we've got the mRNA vaccine. Decades
of research actually converge to create the mRNA
platforms through rapid design, precise antigen
targeting, and we have no more need to grow pathogens.
The COVID -19 accelerates deployment, but the
platform is now being explored for others like
influenza, RSV, HIV, and even personalized cancer
vaccine. It's looking pretty good. Maybe I should
get somebody in to really explain that MNRA vaccines
do not mess with your DNA. They do not. They
just don't. Regardless, across this timeline,
the pattern is clear. As our understanding of
microbes and immunity deepens, vaccines shift
from empirical hacks to engineered biological
tools. Okay, now that I've laid this all out,
I've done the quick little TikTok of like how
we got from the first vaccine and all the vaccines
to this point. I haven't really gone into all
the empirical data. I'm a volcanologist. I'm
not an immunologist. But I'm pretty good at reading
the history and following evidence and understanding
the scientific method. One of the things I really
need to poke at though before we start moving
on a little bit more is vaccine schedules aren't
arbitrary. I've seen a lot of people try to push
back on this online. They're built from three
overlapping principles. The first is immune system
timing. So we understand when infants and children
respond to different antigens. So... That's important.
Some vaccines work brilliantly at two months.
Others need a mature immune system before the
immune system can recognize it and build a proper
immunity to it. Schedules are tuned to when the
body can generate the strongest, safest, and
most durable response. There's a lot of information
that goes into that. And second, Epidemiology
and risk windows. Vaccines are also timed to
protect people before they enter high -risk periods.
For example, Petrusis is the most dangerous in
early infancy. So the DTAP series starts early.
HPV vaccination is given before sexual exposure.
Seasonal vaccines like influenza are timed to
circulating strains. And lastly, booster logic.
That's where you go take a booster shot. Immunity
isn't binary. Some vaccines produce lifelong
production. Others need reinforcement. Boosters
are scheduled based on measured antibody decay,
memory cell persistence, and real -world outbreak
data. The result is a schedule that is not just
medically optimized, it's engineered to protect
the population at the exact moments when immunity
matters most. The data is clear. It should really
end there. Our immune system can take that. It's
better the vaccines than the diseases. Could
there be tweaks that improve with outcomes of
new data and so on and such? Yeah, sure. But
the structure of all the current and past data
suggests it broadly should stay. It's not going
to drastically change. Let's just quote a major
World Health Organization -Lancet analysis, where
vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives
in the past 50 years. Most of them infants. Yeah.
That single shift in childhood survival is one
of the biggest reasons global life expectancy
has risen so dramatically. Vaccination isn't
just a medical tool. It's one of the most powerful
life -extending technologies humans have ever
created. Nothing is going to extend your life
longer than vaccines. and perhaps not smoking
so you'd think terrain theory has safely died
and retired to the 19th century at least on a
by itself filed somewhere between i don't know
right around a for arsenic tonics for vitality
but it reappears not in scientific journals but
in the sprawling wellness economy detox kits
cleanse programs immune boosting supplements
and the glossy lifestyle brands promising to
Optimize your terrain. And the language is instantly
recognizable. Diseases can't exist in a healthy
body. Cleanse your system. Boost your terrain
so pathogens can't take hold. It's bechomp all
over again, but with better branding and a subscription
model. You see it everywhere. Gwyneth Paltrow's
goop market detox teas, infrared sauna blankets,
and cleanse programs that promote... to reset
your system biohacking personalities like dave
asprey promote mitochondria optimization cold
plunges and supplements stacks as a way of making
your body unfriendly to pathogens he's also a
backer of rfk jr wanting more deregulation in
the biohacking sphere oh my god he also says
that he believes that he's going to live to 180.
And he takes like a hundred supplements a day
or something. I don't know. It's freaking crazy.
There's other quacks out there too, like Anthony
William Covilio, aka the medical medium who pushes
celery juice and liver rescue cleanses as a way
to eliminate mystery toxins and prevent illness.
He is a complete quack. No data. Influencers
sell parasite cleanses, heavy metal detox drops,
lymphatic drainage tools, and terrain support
elixirs. which includes Alex Jones, actually,
that claim to make your infection -proof. Supplement
brands like Orgafani, Moon Juice, and Bulletproof
market powders and tonics framed as immune boosters
and detoxifiers. None of these people deny microbes
exist. It's much more subtle than that. The message
is, if you perfect your terrain, infections simply
won't happen. The microbe becomes optional. You
can ignore it. Terrain becomes everything. And
this framing is seductive. It's deeply seductive
because it feels empowering. It suggests that
you can control everything that happens to your
body. You just need to try it. It removes the
randomness from the equation, which also harkens
back to the Black Death and just people randomly
getting sick. It offers simple, accountable solutions
to systems that are anything but simple. And
if you're anxious about health, terrain -only
thinking is comforting. It tells you illness
isn't chaotic or unfair. It's a solvable puzzle.
It's a worldview that promises certainty in a
biological universe that is fundamentally probabilistic.
It almost sounds like I'm talking about quantum
mechanics. Okay, but here's the critical distinction.
Supporting health is not the same thing as preventing
infectious disease. You can eat perfectly. You
can sleep eight hours a night, meditate, hydrate,
cold plunge, sauna cycle, and have a microbiome
that looks like a national park. You can still
get influenza, RSV, or norovirus or measles if
you're unvaccinated. Because microbes don't check
your wellness routine before they replicate.
They don't care how optimized your mitochondria
are. They care about access and exposure and
susceptibility. And this happens. People died
in the U .S. and Canada last year in 2025 due
to the measles, a preventable disease. So terrain
matters, nutrition, stress, chronic illness,
and living conditions all shape how sick you
get. They influence severity, recovery time,
and complications. But they do not determine
whether a virus can infect you in the first place.
I could go on and on and on. It drives me crazy.
Because modern detox culture collapses just that
distinction completely. It treats supporting
health as a shield against infection, when in
reality it's more like padding. And then there's
the detox framing itself. It flushes out toxins.
Resets your system. Cleanses your body of impurities.
These phrases can sound scientific, but they're
not tied to anything measurable. There's no measurable
toxin, any defined mechanism, or even validated
endpoint. They're... metaphors, useful for marketing,
not for immunology. Your liver and kidneys already
detox for you continuously. Your immune system
already clears pathogens. You don't need a three
-day juice cleanse, a $300 supplement bundle,
or a lymph -activating jade roller to do what
your body already is doing for you right now
for free. And as I've already mentioned, the
irony is that there's real evidence -based ways
to support your terrain. that are profoundly
unsexy. Like eating well, sleeping enough, exercising,
managing your stress, vaccination, clean water,
sanitation, access to healthcare. These don't
trend on social media because they're not novel.
They're not branded. They don't promise transformation
in 48 hours. But they work. The modern resurrection
of terrain theory thrives because it offers a
narrative that feels good. It gives people agency.
It gives them a sense of control in a world where
viruses are invisible, unpredictable, and indifferent
to our preferences. So the core truth hasn't
changed. Terrain shapes the severity of the fire,
or the viruses. And the microbe is the match
that starts it. One last thing before moving
on. RFK Jr. and others... They get this wrong
all the time with terrain. Secondary infections.
They're the ones of the clearest examples of
how terrain matters, but not in the way wellness
culture imagines. You can have a near perfect
health, great sleep, balanced nutrition, a whole
package, and a simple viral infection can still
open the door for something worse, not because
your terrain was weak, but because the first
pathogen temporarily reshaped. Your terrain.
A cold virus can strip away the protective lining
of your throat, suppress local immune defensives,
and create tiny breaches in the mucosa of your
throat. And suddenly bacteria that normally live
harmlessly in your nose or mouth, like streptococcus,
have an opportunity they didn't have yesterday.
That's how you get strep throat after a cold
or a bacteria pneumonia after influenza. The
terrain didn't fail. The terrain or the pathogen
altered it. Another microbe exploited the new
landscape. It's a reminder that terrain isn't
a static personal attribute. It's a dynamic battlefield
constantly shaped by the microbes that entered
it. It's also one of those flipping common refrains
about, oh, COVID -19 doesn't kill people, all
this other stuff does. Yeah, well, what changed
the terrain in the first place? If you don't
get as sick with COVID -19, you have less avenues
for other secondary infections to take hold.
And again, it's sometimes the most dangerous
infections aren't the ones first through the
door, but the ones that followed behind. If you
have immunity from a vaccine, even for a pathogen
that rarely has fatalities, you don't need to
worry about those possible secondary infections.
The one that takes a healthy person to one that
may not make it. Over population scales, the
effect is huge. If you step back and look at
this whole story, from the Black Death to detox
culture, it's really a story about how humans
try to make sense of suffering. In the 1300s,
when plague tore through Europe, people had no
tools to see the cause, no microscopes, no scientific
framework. Disease felt cosmic, spiritual, fated.
You survived because God willed it. The explanations
were comforting because they were familiar. Then
the world slowly sharpened. We started to get
the evidence from microscopes of a hidden universe.
We started to see and push the boundaries of
our relation. And Jenner's cowpox vaccine proved
immunity could be engineered. Staining techniques
in the 1800s let scientists isolate actual bacteria
and things that were causing us to get sick and
watch them underneath the lens. Germ theory finally
connected the dots. Disease wasn't mystical,
it was microbial. And we have all this data.
It is so crystal clear. And yet here we are circling
back to the same old ideas of a couple hundred
years ago. I still don't get it. I still don't
get it. I don't even know how to convince people
that are just so believing in this stuff. You
know, the whole modern terrain -only thinking
isn't new. It's the Black Death with better branding,
and it's medieval belief that illness reflects
moral or personal failure, just repackaged as
toxins and cleanses and boosting your terrain.
It's an idea that if you just live purely enough,
disease can't touch you. That you have total
control, or conversely, if you get sick, it was
meant to be. These explanations sometimes feel
good because they make the world legible. They
give us agency. But they collapse the distinction
that took centuries to uncover a terrain, shapes
the outcome, but microbials initiate the event.
When you get down to it, you know, people are
not powerless. We have vaccines. We have modern
scientific understandings. We're not doomed.
We're not at the mercy of fate. We're living
in the first era of human history where we can
see the cause of disease, measure it, weaken
it, block it, and sometimes eliminate it completely.
And it's still a story we're writing. We're still
inventing new things. We're still looking at
new ways of using vaccines. It's pretty cool,
but I just wish we would stop revisiting these
old ideas. It drives me crazy. So that brings
to an end here for this solo episode yet again.
Hopefully I did it some justice, and hopefully
Robin is glad that I did it and enjoys it. Hopefully
the rest of you guys do too. Remember, you can
definitely send me an email. It's in the show
notes. You can leave me some messages on social
media. poke me and kind of push the show in different
directions. What kind of guests should I actually
be trying to get at? This episode was fun to
put together. These solo episodes actually take
up a lot of work, especially when they're not
in my wheelhouse. So it'll be a while before
I probably do another one of these. I'll see
you guys again in two weeks with a guest. It's
going to be awesome. Bye. So misbehaved echoes
of melodies remind us it's always colors. We've
stories painting the sky swaying to rhythms as
the galaxies fly by.