Interview with Carl Zimmer, columnist at The New York Times
I often reference one of Carl Zimmer’s quotes during the science communication workshops we organize at IIT: “Your readers don’t have access to your knowledge. They have to rely, for the most part, on what you put on the page.” To me, it effectively explains the core of science writing. I had the opportunity to see this advice put into practice by Carl Zimmer himself. On Friday, November 1st, at the Festival della Scienza in Genova, Zimmer held a one-hour lecture, capturing the attention of a full room of attendees as he discussed the stories of viruses and spillovers from animals to humans that have impacted our lives on Earth: Influenza, HIV, SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. This topic is central to one of his 15 science books, A Planet of Viruses, first published in the U.S. in 2011. Last year, the publishing house Mondadori Università decided to renew, translate, and issue it in Italy (as “Un Pianeta di Virus”), making it the first time one of his books has been made available to the Italian public. This is the reason why he landed in Genova.
Carl Zimmer is a columnist for The New York Times, a prolific writer, a well-known science journalist, and an adjunct professor at Yale University, where he teaches science writing. Three of his books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. In 2019, his book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh won the National Academies Communication Award and was regarded by The Guardian as the best science-themed book of 2018. In 2016, he earned the Stephen Jay Gould Prize. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he contributed to the coverage that won The New York Times the Public Service Pulitzer Prize in 2021. On February 2025 his new book “Air-borne: the hidden history of the life we breathe” will be published in the U.S..
I had the honor of meeting him and interviewing him for IIT OpenTalk.
One of your latest book discusses viruses, and your column in the New York Times is titled Origins, where you cover stories about genomics, evolution, and the history of our species alongside other living beings. What fascinates you the most about this subject?
I think it’s fascinating that we can actually figure out how so many things about life originated both in our own bodies and in other species because these are processes that took millions even billions of years and we weren’t there to see it happen, but scientists can reconstruct it. Now they can look at fossils, but they can also look at DNA, for example, and you know there’s a whole history of life in our own genes. Our genes record many of these important chapters in the history of life and so I really enjoy talking with scientists who are learning how to read that.
Genomics, particularly RNA biology and related technologies, are revolutionizing medicine. What do you think the next step will be?
There’s a lot of different directions that genomics can go in. I think the main challenge right now is to harness our ability to sequence the human genome. This is a huge accomplishment; the human genome is like hundreds of books and yet it’s very difficult at first for scientists to read it. The first human genome was sequenced at a price of about 3 billion dollars and it took about 10 years. Today the human genome can be sequenced in maybe an hour or two, and it can cost as little as a few 100 dollars. This is an incredible amount of power we have, but it really has not yet changed medicine in all the ways it potentially could. When a baby is born maybe we should sequence every baby’s genome and learn how to make predictions about their health based on what we see in the genes. There are rare genetic disorders that need to be identified as quickly as possible, there are risks – you are at risk for heart disease for example – that change the way you live your life. That hasn’t really taken hold yet; I would say it’s going to take a while.
In terms of what we know about human evolution, do you think genomics will help us discover something new?
Genomics has already told us so much about human evolution; we have been able to sequence the genome of Neanderthals, for example, and we can look at the Neanderthal genomes from 50,100 thousand years ago compared to human genomes and we discovered that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals several times, certainly 200,000 years ago and as recently as 50,000 years ago. And all human beings carry little bits of Neanderthal DNA and that Neanderthal DNA actually influences our health; it can influence whether you get severe COVID or not. This is astonishing and it’s really just the beginning. We’re going starting to discover entirely new species of extinct humans just from their genomics. It’s a real revolution.
Your books are not easily accessible in Italy because they have not been translated or published in our country, except for the latest one, which you published with Mondadori Università (Un Pianeta di Virus). If you could recommend one of your other books to Italian readers, which one would it be?
It’s like choosing between your children! One book that I’m especially proud of is called “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh” and it came out in 2018. It’s a book about heredity, what does it mean to us. I look at how, for example, in early Europe heredity meant power, how power was inherited through lines of kings and then how heredity was used to develop scientific racism. There’s a very dark side of heredity, but heredity is also how we connect ourselves to the past and there are many different forms that are heredity. One form is our DNA; another one, that makes humans so powerful, is that we also have cultural heredity so we inherit culture from our ancestors, and we can then modify it and then pass it down to future generations.
The New York Times has a very informative, attractive, and well-known science section, which is quite unique in the world. In contrast, there are countries like Italy or those in South America—such as Brazil or Argentina—or even India, where it is more challenging to have dedicated science sections in the media. Do you have any secret, insights or suggestions on how to address this?
The New York Times science section is a very special place not just when you look at the rest of the world but within the United States. Many newspapers have had science sections over the years, but many newspapers have decided to close them. Newspapers are shrinking unfortunately in many cases in the United States and it’s very painful to watch happen and we are losing our science writers among other journalists. It’s a bad situation. The New York Times has figured out a way to keep going and to grow their leadership; to attract subscribers who like to play games or look at recipes or whatever, and that’s great because that then all supports reporting on things like science. I think that we’re fortunate that our editors recognize that our readers are very passionate about science. They care about it; they want to read about it. In situations like the pandemic, they will focus entirely on what is the science. I suppose, for what the secret is, I think it would be just a long running support of science reporting and recognizing the importance of science to current events. People just talk a lot about politics but like that politics is happening on a planet that’s getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Climate change is science and if you aren’t covering the science, you aren’t covering the news.
Speaking of politics, the new President of the United States will be elected soon. Depending on who is elected, the situation for the present and future of science could change significantly. What do you think will definitely change?
How science will change depends on who gets elected. Donald Trump has denied the reality of climate change and his response to when people have talked about climate change is that he wants to drill for more oil; in other words, he will make the planet hotter and more difficult for humans to survive on. That’s just a fact. Kamala Harris is part of the administration which is the first United States administration to make a serious investment in dealing with climate change by figuring out how to move us away from carbon emitting fossil fuels. The US is still burning a lot of fossil fuels and that’s a problem, but there is a serious investment from the Biden-Harris administration to moving away from that. That is essential for us to prevent the worst potential scenarios of climate change: massive sea level rises, droughts making some parts of the world uninhabitable for humans. The choice could not be more serious.
