Robin Lindley, , has reassuring news about pandemics in an interview with Dr Peter C. Doherty, immunologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and author of Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know and Their Fate Is Our Fate: How Birds Foretell Threats to Our Health and Our World. For a longer view of medicine through the life of a revered Roman doctor, see Robin’s feature, book review, and author interview on Galen of Pergamum.