David Quammen

Ever since there have been humans, mosquitoes have been biting us, and we’ve been trying to kill them. And, for the most part, the mosquitoes have been winning. Until now. 

Robert Krulwich and our Senior Editor Soren Wheeler call up David Quammen to get a scientific perspective on the current Ebola outbreak.

KILL 'EM ALL

David Quammen discusses the emergence of strange new diseases around the world that originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. In Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, he recounts his adventures in the field—netting bats in China, trapping monkeys in Bangladesh, stalking gorillas in the Congo—with the world’s leading disease scientists to learn how, why, and where these diseases emerge.

In the early 1980s, epidemiologists were racing to understand a mysterious disease that was killing young men in California.

Rosemary Morton had a little ... trouble with gravity.

Three stories that upend our pre-conceived notions about falling.

Could some cancers be contagious? New evidence suggests certain types of cancer can spread from one person to another. Journalist David Quammen’s article for the April issue of Harper’s magazine is "Contagious Cancer: The Evolution of a Disease."