I am Andreas W. Pross, author of Dicke Luft. My path led me from technical professions through software development and business management to a personal and scientific search for clues about indoor air, health, and perception. For many years I searched for explanations for complaints that did not fit into a clear overall picture. Only after a turning point did I begin to understand what role the air in enclosed spaces might have played in all of this.
Detailed Biography
I was born in Germany in 1979 and grew up in an environment where technology, craftsmanship, and entrepreneurial thinking played an important role from an early age. Even as a child, I was fascinated by how things work. Machines, electrical systems, and computers held a special appeal for me. Already in primary school, I wrote poems and stories on my aunt’s typewriter. With the start of secondary school, however, that talent faded.
My professional path began with technical training. First I completed training as an energy electronics technician, and later another apprenticeship as a tool mechanic. While I experienced during the first training how easily learning and understanding could come to me when the conditions were right, in other phases of life exhaustion, headaches, concentration problems, and memory disturbances kept returning.
Later I worked in software development, IT consulting, and business management. I developed programs, supported customers, built structures, and took on responsibility in a medium-sized company. Outwardly, many things worked. Inwardly, however, the feeling remained for many years that something fundamental was not right.
I searched for the causes where people usually search for them: in stress, the psyche, work, nutrition, family burdens, medical diagnoses, and personal weaknesses. Again and again there were individual explanations, but no answer that made the whole picture understandable.
The turning point came with what we later called Day Zero. After that, my wife Monika and I began to question our environment systematically. We measured, observed, compared, researched, and related memories to each other in new ways. In the process, one factor moved to the center that we had previously barely paid attention to: the air in enclosed spaces.
Out of that search came our first book together, Dicke Luft. For me, the book is not an abstract theory, but an attempt to make a long personal experience understandable. But it is far more than that. For me, it is proof of how significantly my health improved after Day Zero, because otherwise such a work could never have come into being.
In it, I combine autobiographical storytelling with scientific research and the question of whether indoor air, CO2, VOCs, formaldehyde, particulate matter, mold, and ventilation may play a greater role in many complaints than we realize in everyday life.
Today I want to help ensure that indoor air is taken more seriously. Not as a simple explanation for everything, but as a fundamental environmental factor that could influence our thinking, feeling, sleeping, behavior, and health.
