2025-03-07
11 分钟For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
If you're familiar with John Green,
you might associate him with best selling young adult novels like the Fault in Our Stars or with the halcyon days of early YouTube vlogging.
But a few years ago, John became obsessed with a topic that you might find tuberculosis.
His new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, comes out on March 18th.
He's here today to tell us how tuberculosis has shaped our world and why,
even though it's now curable, it remains our planet's deadliest infectious disease.
John, thanks so much for joining us to chat today.
Oh, thanks for having me.
Tell us about your new book.
I think for some folks who are familiar with your work,
they might be surprised to hear that you've been so interested in tuberculosis.
Yeah, it's certainly a change from writing young adult novels.
I became obsessed with tuberculosis in 2019 when I visited a TB hospital in Sierra Leone and met a boy living with tuberculosis who shared a name with my son,
Henry.
Through my friendship with Henry,
I really started to think differently about the disease 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 technology over the last 75.
Because tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s,
but it's still our deadliest infectious disease.