Virtual Author Talk: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs with Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts

*THIS IS A VIRTUAL PROGRAM*

Join us for this enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts as she talks about how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making. Drawing 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 emerging infectious diseases, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.

Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. 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 The Human Disease. With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them, by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains. A presentation you don’t want to miss, register now!

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Can't make it to the live show? It will be recorded and archived. Click here to view all previous author talks.

Our Virtual Author Talk series is generously sponsored by the Welles-Turner Memorial Library Second Century Fund.