Research - Plague

The '25 Minutes on...' series draws on the range of expertise among All Souls Fellows, some of them established leaders in their fields, others elected early in their careers for the promise of becoming so. Here, five of the College’s Fellows discuss their research on the theme of Plagues, each from a very different angle: the earliest known outbreaks among prehistoric hunter-gatherers; the epidemic that helped precipitate a crisis in the Roman Empire; the ways institutions have handled contagion from the Black Death to Covid; the mathematical modelling of pandemics; and the modern threat of antimicrobial resistance. The talks are intended for a general audience and assume no specialist knowledge.

A new study, by an international team of scientists including Dr Ruairidh Macleod, Professor Christopher Ramsey and Professor Rick Schulting, published today in Nature reconstructs the earliest known plague genomes and for the first time shows that early forms of plague caused deadly outbreaks – long before the Black Death killed up to half the population of Europe.