🦠 Biosecurity Futures | Worse Than Nature

Natural pathogens are constrained. They evolve to spread, and spreading and killing tend to pull against each other, which is a large part of why the historical record looks the way it does. But those constraints are biological, not physical. A pathogen built on purpose does not have to respect them. This opening session introduces the idea of global catastrophic biological risk: what separates a severe pandemic from one that could permanently derail human civilisation, what the history of state and non-state biological weapons programmes actually tells us, and why a field of serious researchers has concluded this is one of the most neglected risks we face. It also maps out where the rest of the series goes. Biosecurity Futures is an introductory series on global catastrophic biological risks, hosted by the Zurich Biosecurity Hub at ETH Zürich. Biosecurity Futures Series Schedule: Worse Than Nature: Why the Deadliest Pandemics Won't Be Natural Ones — 30 Sep AI Meets Biology: What Frontier Models Actually Change — 12 Oct (Monday) Mirror Life: A Risk We Could Still Prevent — 28 Oct The Air We Share: Clean Air, Far-UVC and Defences That Work Against Anything — 11 Nov Layers of Defence: Screening DNA, Spotting Outbreaks, Stacking Imperfect Safeguards — 2 Dec Open to students, researchers and staff from all departments and all universities, and to interested people from outside academia. Free. Subscribe to the calendar to get all five sessions. More at zurichbiosecurity.ch. Questions: [email protected]