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Online Author Talk With Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts

How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs

Join us for this enlightening online discussion 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. Adults. Register to get a link. A recording will also be available for later viewing.

Join us for this enlightening online discussion 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 Sabrina Sholts' book "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 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.

With an 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.

Adults. Register to receive a link for viewing this online event.

About the Author: Sabrina Sholts is a biological anthropologist and curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Her research explores intersections of human, animal and environmental health in the past and present. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in integrative biology and at Stockholm University in biophysics and biochemistry.

This event is part of DBRL's Online Author Series, supported by David Lile honorarium funds. A recording will also be available for later viewing on the author series site.

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