Asimov Press
Asimov Press is a publisher focused on biotechnology. Our articles look forward — to the bottlenecks and breakthroughs that will decide what biology can do next — while being rooted firmly in the past, and all the discoveries that got us here. More than anything, we aim to be the place where biotechnologists talk to each other; a home for those building this field and for the readers trying to understand it.
We are an editorially-independent team founded by Asimov and hosted within Renaissance Philanthropy. Explore our archives; listen to our articles and podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts; and watch our video podcasts on YouTube.
We publish exceptionally rigorous articles, both reportage and essays. Our Reported articles contextualize scientific progress by tracing ideas through the people who had them, but also consider the hard problems, or bottlenecks, that need to be overcome.
Essays are more opinionated. They lay out a problem and then make the case for why it matters. An essay does not have to be reported in the conventional sense, but we still ask our writers to leave their own heads and, before publishing, share drafts with others in the field to hash out disagreements.
Finally, we record audio versions for all articles. We also host regular interview podcasts and events in San Francisco and New York, gathering biologists together to talk through the ideas surfaced in our articles. In this way, we try to push beneficial ideas forward in the world.
Our work is supported by donations and sponsorships. Thanks to Asimov, Edison Scientific, Fulcrum, and Likith Govindaiah for financial support.
Why Biotechnology?
Our fixation on biotechnology is deliberate, because we feel its potential to improve the world — touching everything from longevity to climate to animal welfare — is most extreme.
A century ago, two young researchers extracted insulin from dogs and used the molecule to treat people with diabetes. In the 1950s, the U.S.D.A. bred screwworms, sterilized them with X-rays, and airdropped them over Texas to decimate invasive screwworm populations, which killed hundreds of thousands of cattle each year. In 2024, a twice-yearly injection to prevent HIV, called lenacapavir, was given to 2,134 young women in South Africa and Uganda. Amazingly, none of them caught the virus.
These kinds of stories would have once seemed like miracles, but now happen nearly every month. Dozens of cell and gene therapies have been FDA-approved. Engineered microbes convert steel factory waste into ethanol. Some vaccines are designed on computers. And 95 percent of livestock in America are fed with genetically modified crops.
Despite immense progress, however, there is much more to be done. Our work spans across new and underrated ideas in biotechnology. We are especially interested in articles in the following categories:
Curing or preventing disease. Reported features on how a disease was beaten or how it ought to be beaten, plus diagnostics, delivery methods, and market failures. We’re also interested in deep writing on biosecurity. See our prior articles: How to Build a Strep A Vaccine, An Antivenom Cocktail Made by a Llama, A Visual Guide to Gene Delivery, and Antibiotics Are an Economic Failure.
The living world. These articles cover everything that is alive that isn’t human, from interventions for animal welfare to methods for making coral reefs more heat-resistant. See A Shift from Animal Testing, What It’s Like To Be A Worm, Pausing Insect Activity, and Cable Bacteria are Living Batteries.
Protecting and expanding biological life. How biology feeds and fuels us, and whether it can do so while improving the planet. This also includes astrobiology and efforts to take, or discover, life on other planets. See Why Nigeria Accepted GMOs, Culture Shift, and Why Nothing Can Grow on Mars*.
Tools to measure and control biology. The instruments and methods we use to read, write, and measure living systems, including the histories of how they came to exist. See A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing, Making the Electron Microscope, Seeing Microbes from the Sky, and Solving the Electroporation Bottleneck.
We Are…
Builders: Asimov Press aims to build a vibrant, intellectual community of readers. We speak to an audience that is interested in theory, how things work, what is possible, and the people doing all of this.
Vigilant: While scientific progress can be used to do good in the world, it can also carry concomitant risks that we take seriously. We are excited by the good that science can do for the world, but there are often better ways to accomplish the same goals. Asimov Press has a moral imperative to bring to light the risks and the unknown surrounding these emerging capabilities.
Mechanistic: Science is not magic. Our pieces are precise, detailed, and clear. They explain how things work and why.
Exhaustive: Our articles do not rely on hype or hyperbole. They provide quantitative evidence, demonstrate probabilistic reasoning, and are assiduously fact-checked. When factual errors are found in an article, we update them with a correction.
Pitch Guide
We welcome pitches from writers who can make sense of scientific progress. Our essay authors are typically researchers or policy experts with extensive knowledge in their field, and our features are often written by journalists with a deep science background.
All pitches should be clear and accessible. Steven Pinker reminds us, “The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” We want to avoid the curse of knowledge and publish pieces that are capable of simplifying complicated ideas while remaining rigorous and well-reasoned. Like all good writing, an Asimov Press piece shows rather than tells.
Note, too, that we fact check every article. Writers should provide references, sources, data, or charts to support claims.
Your pitch should contain enough information that our editors have a sense of where the story will go and what evidence you have to support your claims. A good pitch answers the questions: What will readers take away from the piece? Why is this important and timely? Why are you in a unique position to tell this story?
We want evidence-backed stories driven by a sense of urgency and wonder. We don’t want desultory explorations of a topic, pieces that respond to discrete papers or news, or PR for your company. We do not publish explainers, whitepapers, or fiction.
Please send pitches and other questions to editors@asimov.com. Include “PITCH” in the email’s subject line, and include the full pitch within the body of the e-mail.
Masthead
Niko McCarty (Founding Editor) Niko is a former bioengineer and data journalist. He lives in Berkeley, CA and holds degrees in synthetic biology and science journalism from Imperial College London, Caltech, and New York University. He was previously a fellow at Astera Institute, head of media at New Science, and a curriculum designer in genetic engineering at MIT.
Brady Huggett (Editor-in-Chief) Brady is formerly an editor at Nature Biotechnology and features editor at The Transmitter, a science publication inside the Simons Foundation. He has created multiple podcasts in biology, including “Hope Lies in Dreams“ and “First Rounders.”
Ulkar Aghayeva (Columnist) Ulkar writes about biology, history, and philosophy of science. Her science history blog is called Measure for Measure.
Devon Balwit (Copyeditor) Devon edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress when not editorializing in her own cartoons and poetry. To see more of her work, visit her website.
Send pitches and enquiries to editors@asimov.com
