Author John Green on How Tuberculosis Shaped Our Modern World

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.3 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

John Green is an author, advocate and one half of the Vlogbrothers. His latest book, Everything Is Tuberculosis, comes out on March 18. Green joins host Rachel Feltman to share how tuberculosis shaped history, geography and culture. He discusses how he came to understand the inequities of tuberculosis and the dire risk public health interruptions pose to patients today. Recommended reading: You can preorder Everything Is Tuberculosis: https://everythingistb.com/#book How Advocates Pushed Big Pharma to Cut Tuberculosis Drug Priceshttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-advocates-pushed-big-pharma-to-cut-tuberculosis-drug-prices/ The Heroic Black Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosishttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-heroic-black-nurses-who-helped-cure-tuberculosis/ E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura and Naeem Amarsy with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.4	For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. If you're familiar with John
0:37.1	Green, you might
0:37.9	associate him with best-selling young adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars or with the
0:42.7	healthy on days of early YouTube vlogging. But a few years ago, John became obsessed with a topic
0:48.5	that you might find surprising, tuberculosis. His new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, comes out on March 18th. He's here today to tell us how
1:00.2	tuberculosis has shaped our world and why, even though it's now curable, it remains our planet's
1:06.0	deadliest infectious disease. John, thanks so much for joining us to chat today. Oh, thanks for having me.
1:11.6	Tell us about your new book, I think, for some folks who are familiar with your work,
1:16.9	they might be surprised to hear that you've been so interested in tuberculosis. Yeah, it's certainly
1:22.9	a change from writing young adult novels. I became obsessed with tuberculosis in 2019 when I visited a
1:31.0	TB hospital in Sierra Leone and met a boy living with tuberculosis who shared a name with my
1:36.3	son, Henry. Through my friendship with Henry, I really started to think differently about the disease
1:41.8	and started to think that the disease in some ways is an exemplification of everything that's wrong with the way we've distributed resources and
1:51.7	technology over the last 75 years because tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s,
1:57.3	but it's still our deadliest infectious disease. And I just think that's such an indictment
2:01.8	of the systems that we've built to improve human health. Absolutely. Well, and for listeners who
2:09.0	might be surprised to hear that it's the deadliest infectious disease, can you give us a sense
	...

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