Town Hall Seattle Science Series

The very fact of being human makes us vulnerable to pandemics, but it also gives us the power to save ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic most likely won’t be our last—that is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of Sabrina Sholts’ new book, The Human Disease. Traveling through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making, Sholts draws on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about pandemic risks, to identify the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts’s account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in her book. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, is largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains. Sabrina Sholts i