Few people can say they saw something first. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek could have done that – if he had known that they were bacteria that he saw through his home-built microscope. A World Full of Secrets follows “the Antonis of today”. Scientists who conduct groundbreaking research, driven by “curiosity”: the desire to discover something new. However, the podcast starts in seventeenth-century Delft, where Van Leeuwenhoek studies his neighbor’s dental plaque or his own sperm in the evening. During the day he runs a yarn shop, he only records his findings in correspondence. Who could have imagined that his sense of wonder would make him the father of microbiology?
A version of this article also appeared in the September 16, 2023 newspaper.