🦠Biosecurity Futures | Worse Than Nature
​Worse Than Nature
Why the Deadliest Pandemics Won't Be Natural Ones
​Wednesday, 30 September 2026 · 18:15–19:45
ETH Zürich, room to be confirmed
​The 1918 influenza pandemic killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million people. Most of us treat that as roughly the worst case: the ceiling on what a pandemic can do.
​There's a case that it's closer to the floor.
​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: info@zurichbiosecurity.ch