| Event type: | Monthly meeting |
| Date: | Mon 9 Mar 2026 |
| Time: | 10:00am - 12:00pm |
| Venue: | St Margaret’s United Reformed Church, N3 1BD |
| Booking: | Note that booking is required. |
The Silk Roads have always been a vital route of trade and exchange – not only of goods, but also of knowledge, genes and diseases. In this talk, we will hear how diseases such as the Black Death and smallpox traversed the Silk Roads to become worldwide pandemics, and how DNA from one man’s Y-chromosome – thought to be Genghis Kahn’s – is present in 8% of the modern population.
Speaker (and NLU3A member) Robin Weiss is Emeritus Professor of Virology at University College London. Robin was Director of Research at the Institute of Cancer Research (1980–98) and President of the Microbiology Society (2006–09). In recognition of his contributions to the understanding of virus infection, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the US National Academy of Sciences. After retirement, Robin travelled along parts of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran.