The molecular biology laboratory hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. 

If you were to revisit photos of Howard Berg’s cramped Harvard lab, where the details of bacterial chemotaxis were first worked out, or Sydney Brenner’s Cambridge lab, where they cracked the genetic code, you’d recognize almost everything you saw.

In both, glass bottles of reagents, racks of disposable plastic tips, and half-empty boxes of parafilm wrap cluttered the benches. pH meters dangled coils of cords next to old Gilson pipettes, resting on their sides. Ice buckets held a jumble of tubes, labels fading into illegibility. A tabletop centrifuge hummed in the corner, its brushed-metal body dented from hard use. Even the smell, if you could step inside the frame, would be familiar — likely a faint mix of ethanol and agar.

People commonly point to this seeming stagnation in laboratory design while opining on how laboratories of the future ought to look. We clearly need to update our equipment, especially as AI and computational tools advance. But in many respects, the fact that our scientific devices haven’t changed much in the past 50 years also speaks to their tremendous ingenuity and versatility. 

Asimov Press’s next book, Making the Modern Laboratory, aims to present the history behind the tools and methods that have helped shape modern biology research — and also to imagine what they might look like in the future.

This illustrated, coffee table-sized volume will delve into the origins of the machines, equipment, organisms, and reagents that have become familiar features of molecular biology laboratories over the last sixty years. The book will close with a set of essays that look forward, offering visions of how we could reinvent the laboratory itself. It is an intellectual companion to other books on these subjects, including The Matter Factory: A History of the Chemistry Laboratory, albeit focused on biology and more visual in nature.

Creating a book of this scope won’t be easy, though, so we’re looking for contributors to help us. All will be paid and listed as coauthors. 

We are commissioning contributions of three types:

1. Sidebars ($50) are small blocks of text, 150 to 280 words in length, that appear next to featured images.

2. Essays ($500) will run 750 to 1,250 words in length. 

3. Long Reads ($1,500) introduce each chapter in the book and typically run more than 2,000 words in length. Additionally, they will go out to our newsletter subscribers prior to the book’s publication.

Our list of essay ideas follows. We know that with a topic so large, we may have missed something, so reach out if there’s an idea you hoped to see but don’t. Equally, if you think that a short essay topic deserves fuller treatment, write to us and explain why! If you’d like to take part in this project, email editors@asimov.com with your name, selected article idea, the details you’d include in the piece, and why you’re qualified to write it.

Subscribe now

Sidebars

1. Eppendorf tubes. Why are these plastic tubes shaped as they are (i.e. Why not square bottoms?), and was Eppendorf the company that first invented them? What need did they meet?

2. Microscope lenses. What major breakthrough enabled these lenses to be machined with such precision? And what discoveries did they enable when microscopes gained higher resolutions?

3. Petri dish. Who is Petri and why did he make these? What were scientists using before?

4. pH meter. How did the pH meter come about? How does it work, and how was pH measured before?

5. Flow cytometer. A box filled with laser beams that separate individual cells sounds like, well, science fiction. Who thought up the first flow cytometer, and what did it look like? What breakthrough made it possible?

6. OD Meter. Who was the first person to quantify the growth rate of bacterial cells by measuring their optical density, and how did they actually do it? How does OD directly relate to cellular concentration, and who came up with the equation to deliver accurate measurements?

7. Liquid chromatography. What was the first truly “modern” liquid chromatography device, and who invented it? How did it work compared to the more advanced machines used today? 

8. Nanodrop spectrophotometer. Who invented this and how? What do these devices actually do, and why do they seem so ridiculously inaccurate even today?

9. Electroporator. Who invented electroporation and figured out that you can get DNA into cells by first zapping them with electricity? And then, finally, what did the first machine look like? Were there other uses for these machines before DNA transformations?

10. Lab scale. Give key historical examples. Compare their precision with scales used today. What standardized scale was first distributed commercially?

11. Vortex Mixer. The first vortex mixer was, it seems, patented in 1962 and used to solubilize liquids. What did people do before that? Why was such a mixer needed? Why can’t we just shake the tubes? “The Evolution of the Vortex Mixer” and “Evolution of Biological Shakers and Stirrers” may have useful details.

12. Restriction enzymes. How were they discovered, what do they do, and how many variants are there?

13. SYBR Safe is a fluorescent dye used to visualize DNA molecules. Who invented it, and what did researchers use before? 

14. HeLa cells. A brief description of the origins of HeLa cells, the first immortalized human cell line. And what does it mean for a cell to be “immortalized”?

15. C. elegans. How were these little worms discovered, and who figured out they’d be well-suited for biology research? What were some seminal early studies on C. elegans (perhaps in longevity and brain connectome research)?

16. Arabidopsis thaliana. Similar to the above essay on C. elegans, how did this become the de facto organism for plant biology?

17. Zebrafish (Danio rerio). Similar to above.

18. Opentrons. Who founded Opentrons, and what was their first robotic pipette like? What attempts at automation existed before?

19. RosettaFOLD and early protein software. What were the first examples of “protein software” used by scientists? How did RosettaFOLD emerge, and who made the key breakthroughs? 

20. DNA Manipulation Software. What was the first DNA editing program, and what did it look like? How did we go from command-line tools to SnapGene and Benchling?

21. Hamilton and Liquid Handlers. Who made the first programmable pipetting robot? How do Hamilton systems work, and how did they become standard in high-throughput biology?

22. Mass spectrometer. Who first adapted mass spectrometry for biology? What was the breakthrough that allowed us to measure fragile biomolecules, and how have the machines changed since?

Essays

1. Lab Coats. How did these evolve? Are they white because we associate that color with “purity” and “cleanliness,” because they’re easier to bleach, or what? Alexis Carrel famously wore a black lab coat. Could they be improved? 

2. PCR Machines. Early machines to amplify DNA were cobbled together from heating blocks well before programmable thermocyclers arrived in the late ’80s. Today’s machines are sleek, fast, and run dozens of reactions at once — but the principle is the same: heat, cool, and repeat. How did they come to be? What did early versions look like?

3. Light microscopes. Modern light microscopes are the product of centuries of refinement, from crude 17th-century tubes to precision instruments that can reveal a single bacterium. Lens grinding, better illumination, and optical corrections made these advances possible. We’d like a short essay covering some of them.

4. Growth media. Potato slices, meat broth, and gelatin were all used to grow microbes before agar existed. We’d like a short essay examining the major changes to growth media through the centuries. 

5. Deionized water. “Pure” water is never really pure. Early distillation helped, but trace ions and metals remained. The realization that these impurities could wreck experiments led to ion-exchange columns, reverse osmosis, and conductivity monitors. How, finally, did we invent a means to make truly pure water in the laboratory?

6. Drosophila. In T.H. Morgan’s “fly room” at Columbia, fruit flies became the model organism of choice to identify genes’ locations on chromosomes. We’d like an ode to the fruit fly that covers why these animals were selected and perhaps also features a bit of Morgan’s setup and experiments. 

7. E. coli. We’d like a look at Theodor Escherich’s isolation of the microbe in the 1800s, followed by the discovery of BL21 (from a Stanford hospital patient) all the way up to MG1655 and other strains. Trace the history of major E. coli strains and briefly explain how this microbe caught on instead of, say, Bacillus. 

8. S. cerevisiae (yeast). Humans domesticated yeast thousands of years ago for bread and beer. Scientists later found it’s also a perfect eukaryotic model, with a small genome, easy genetics, and fast growth. How did it become such a dominant model organism?

9. Agar. Before agar, microbiologists used gelatin to grow cells, which melted in warm incubators and was also eaten by bacteria. Fanny Hesse recognized that agar, a seaweed extract that is heat-stable and inert, would be a better way to grow cells on solid surfaces in the 1880s. Tell us this story!

10. Taq Ligase & Polymerase. Thermus aquaticus survives in Yellowstone’s boiling pools, and its polymerase enzyme can therefore survive PCR’s heat cycles. That single enzyme turned PCR from manual to automated. Later versions, like Q5 and Phusion improved accuracy, but Taq remains the classic. We’d like a short essay covering how Taq polymerase was first isolated and discovered, why it sat unused in a genome database for two decades, and how the “new” versions, like Q5 and Phusion, were made.

11. PhiX174. In 1977, British biochemist Frederick Sanger’s team sequenced the tiny PhiX174 bacteriophage genome — the first DNA genome ever read end-to-end. Today, PhiX174 is still used as the standard sequencing control! How did Sanger select this phage, and where did it come from?

Long Reads

1. A history of glassware. We’d like a long-form history of laboratory glassware. Corning is probably central to the story, but so are the individuals who made the first Erlenmeyer flask, beaker, and graduated cylinder. Why is each shaped the way it is? How did glassblowers achieve precise dimensions and markings for measurement? This essay should trace the origins of the major glassware we still use today.

2. A history of bioreactors. From the earliest fermentation vats to modern stainless-steel ones, bioreactors have transformed biology into an industrial-scale process. They are also a major limit on our ability to “scale” biology, and there is a shortage of biomanufacturing capacity in the United States. We’d like a long-form essay covering the people and innovations that made modern bioreactors what they are. How did engineers first control temperature, pH, and oxygen levels in a sealed vessel? How did bioreactors scale from liters to thousands of liters, and what made it possible to run them reliably? The essay could conclude, perhaps, by explaining why it’s so difficult to make more bioreactors.

3. Evolution of DNA sequencing machines. We’d like to commission a “visual” essay covering the history of major sequencing advances. It should cover the first manual protocols with radiolabeled dNTPs, slab gels, automated capillary sequencers, and finally, next-generation machines. It should briefly explain how new chemistry and new forms of automation enabled each step. The essay could end by looking at some more recent technologies, such as sequencing-by-expansion.

4. Laboratory of the Future. What should the lab of 2060 look like? We’d like a series of pieces (both non-fiction and speculative fiction) to answer this question. Non-fiction essays should ideally be grounded in history, from past visions of the “automated laboratory” that never came to pass, to current projects like DynamicLand that rethink how people and tools interact. Why has the evolution of the laboratory been so slow, and what challenges stand in the way? What could a lab become if we designed it from scratch?

Thanks for reading. If any of these appeal to you or if you think we missed one, let us know at editors@asimov.com.

Sincerely,

The Asimov Press Team

Issue 07 launches this Monday with a marvelously researched essay on the uncertain origins of aspirin. Author Sean Harrison spent months tracking down original translations and primary sources to unpack the history behind one of the world’s most prescribed drugs, only to discover that many commonly referenced texts are likely wrong. 

To celebrate the new issue, we are also releasing new merchandise (custom-designed shirts, hats, and posters) and hosting a biology trivia night in San Francisco on July 23! The event hosts will provide snacks and drinks, and the winning teams will get signed copies of our DNA books and free hats. Please RSVP to join.

Register here

Issue 07 also features:

1. Leech Therapy. Authors Khushi Mittal and Xander Balwit make a case for rekindling broader interest in this “alternative treatment.” Alive and well in the Balkans and beyond, hirudotherapy has been sidelined in the West due to cultural distaste and lack of investment. Falling out of fashion with the rise of the modern pharmaceutical industry, it’s ready for a comeback driven not by mania, but rather by a mechanistic understanding of the molecules and bioactive compounds responsible for its efficacy.

2. How Science Becomes Mature. Slime Mold Time Mold argues that maturity — in biology, chemistry, or anything else — requires mechanical models and the ability to talk about nuts, bolts, and the parameters that constrain how they behave. This essay makes a strong case for moving beyond impressionistic research.

3. How to Scale Proteomics. Editor Niko McCarty writes about the work of Parallel Squared Technology Institute, a non-profit research organization focused on scaling proteomics. Proteins carry out most behaviors in cells, yet the tools we have to study them are still woefully inefficient.

4. A Visual Guide to Gene Delivery. The tools for delivering gene therapies into cells have improved radically since the use of retroviruses in the early 1990s. Eryney Marrogi walks us through today’s most noteworthy gene delivery vehicles — AAVs, Lentivirus, Lipid Nanoparticles, and Herpes Simplex Virus — explaining the advantages and limitations of each.

5. A History of Fermentation. Microbiologist Rachel Dutton documents the oldest food preparation method in the world and explains why it is understudied today relative to its historical importance. Dutton discusses how microbes became the enemy of food in the era of canning and pasteurization and why we lack good datasets for understanding the microbiome, aiming to steer us towards a more fermented future. 

6. Making of the Sewers. When talking about the microbiome, we think of the gut flora, and thinking about the gut leads us to human waste. Calum Drysdale shares our enthusiasm for the topic. In a deep dive worthy of the name, Drysdale plunges us into the sewers, where we learn about wastewater epidemiology, fertilizer, and contemporary efforts to derive valuable compounds and materials from our own waste.

7. Insect Diapause. While much has been written on mammal hibernation and torpor, there are pragmatic reasons to care about similar rhythms in insects. In an essay that unites the oddities of invertebrate physiology to the need to improve pest management strategies, Ulkar Aghayeva takes us through life strategies that we seldom consider.

Stories We Want to Publish

Bottlenecks in Tree Engineering

In 1903, John Krusback, the president of a local state bank in Wisconsin, decided that he was going to grow a chair. It took eleven years to produce this naturally grown chair, later exhibited at the World Fair in San Francisco in 1915.

Krusback’s approach and other tree-shaping techniques have inspired many others to create living structures, from the “Circus Trees” to Full Grown, a contemporary furniture company in the UK that is doing what feels like the tree equivalent of growing square watermelons in molds. Today, companies like Living Carbon have advanced from grafting and molds and are using genetic engineering to produce trees that can photosynthesize more efficiently.

Still, despite this enthusiasm and the handful of successes, tree engineering remains challenging. Since we launched, we have been seeking a compelling piece explaining why. What are the bottlenecks of tree engineering, and what would overcoming them solve?

How Model Organisms Arrived in the Lab

For the last 60 years, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has served as a premier laboratory model. The systematic study of its genome, development, behavior, immune system, and a full model of its connectome has indelibly influenced modern biology more than perhaps any other organism, and certainly more than any other free-living nematode. How did this happen? What led Sydney Brenner to select this organism as a model for physiological and neural development in animals?

How, for that matter, does any given model organism become a scientific staple? And conversely, how do they fall out of favor? In the 1950s, we employed beagles in radiation experiments, studying their skeletons for the effects of toxic exposure, and today, dogs are seldom used outside of veterinary research.

The stories behind such model organisms fascinate us, and we want to uncover more of them. This is especially important as we witness a move away from animal models (at least in certain contexts). What knowledge have we gained from them, and what mistakes might they have seduced us into? Before we relinquish them, which should we memorialize?

Pieces on Developmental Biology

On March 27, 1784, the poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a letter to his friend Johann Gottfried Herder: “I have found — neither gold nor silver, but what makes me unspeakably happy — the os intermaxillare in the human!”

Goethe’s unspeakable happiness may have been overblown, as he may not have been the true discoverer, and the bone may not have been distinctly “of humans” as he postulated. However, his excitement is deserved. Where did our anatomy come from?

Our ancestors were, at one point, bony fishes. What vestiges of such vertebrates do we retain today and why? Why do we have vestigial body parts? What was the most recent organ/bone to develop? And what might devolve/evolve next (and is this even an intelligible question)?

From pieces on the discovery of HOX genes and bilateral symmetry to deep dives into how new structures emerge during evolution, we want to cover more developmental biology.

A Visual Guide to Biocatalysis

Issue 06 and 07 both include Visual Guides on Genome Editors and Gene Delivery Vehicles, respectively. We want to continue publishing Visual Guides for complex topics whose concepts would benefit from consistent and comparable illustrations. While we are open to many ideas, we would be especially excited to publish a visual guide to biocatalysis.

Enzymes are the movers and shakers of the biological world, responsible for much of the chemistry that sustains life. Humans have unknowingly harnessed the power of enzymes via microbial fermentation for longer than recorded history. However, in the past century, we have begun to uncover how these powerful biocatalysts function and how to use them for a more sustainable chemistry. We want to create a visual guide and accompanying article that could include sections like the history of biocatalysis, how enzymes work to selectively catalyze chemical reactions, the 6 primary classes of enzymes and their reactions, how enzymes work together in the cell to transform molecules, the tools and techniques that people use to work with and engineer them, and success stories where biocatalysts improved human life.

Units of Measurement

When did scientists standardize various measurements? Why is an Angstrom, equivalent to one ten-billionth of a meter, called an Angstrom? Why do the 96-well plates used in molecular biology laboratories consist of 96 wells instead of 100 or 200? Why is FLOPS a more accurate measure of computer performance than “instructions per second”? We’re open to various articles on the provenance of different measurements across scientific domains.

The Cost of Biomanufacturing

About 40 percent of all drugs on the market are biologics, derived from living cells or organisms rather than chemical synthesis. And many of the best-selling biologics — including Humira and Actemra — are antibodies, Y-shaped proteins conventionally made using Chinese hamster ovary cells grown in big steel tanks.

Many people make hand-wavey claims about how biomanufacturing is super expensive and doesn’t scale, but how much does it really cost to make, say, one gram of a medicine like Humira? We’d like to commission an essay that walks through all the steps involved in making a drug, along with the price tags.

History of Phytotrons

The world's first phytotron (a fusion of the Greek word for plant — phytos — and device — or tron) was an indoor plant research facility that could simulate "every possible climatic condition." It debuted at Caltech in 1949, during the early years of the Cold War, because the U.S. government believed that if they could control the environment, they could also control the food supply. 

Caltech's Phytotron had rooms in which temperature, gas composition, light, humidity, and more could be precisely controlled. Plants were photographed daily to document growth. Between 1945 and the 1980s, Caltech's phytotron model was copied and emulated in Australia, France, Hungary, England, and also the Soviet Union.

There are several phytotrons still in use, including at North Carolina State University. We’d like to commission a history of these remarkable facilities.

Carlsberg 1883

Several years ago, the Carlsberg brewery began selling a special European Lager called “Carlsberg 1883.” The beer was made using yeast extracted and purified from “an old beer bottle found [in] the cellars of the old Carlsberg brewery.” We’d like to commission an essay outlining the steps involved in making this beer (even though it is apparently “dull, but not undrinkable,” according to a Norwegian man who has tried it.)

What We’re Reading

1. The Magic of Code, Samuel Arbesman. A compelling argument for code as “a universal force,” in computers and biology and behind.

2. Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky. An astonishing chronicle of the only rock we eat.

3. Brave Genius, Sean Carroll. The remarkable story of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, documenting their lives in Paris under Nazi occupation all the way through their Nobel Prizes. Monod was an extremely high-ranking member of the French Resistance, with ID badge #002.

4. Helmholtz, David Cahan. A magisterial biography of Hermann von Helmholtz, the 19th-century polymath and destroyer of vitalism.

5. This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. A science fiction time travel novel, with some genetic engineering elements plot points.

6. “The Origin of the Research University,” Clara Collier

7. “The Universal Tech Tree,’ Étienne Fortier-Dubois

8. “The first non-opioid painkiller,” Michelle Ma

9. “Brain Freeze,” Aurelia Song & Charlie Dever. The story of one researcher’s involvement with and work on cryonics.

10. The Dream Machine, M. Mitchell Waldrop. A history of the modern desktop computer (in which Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are only bit players).

See you Monday,

— Niko, Xander & Ella

Niko McCarty interviewed Xander Balwit about Farma and the making of a pro-GMO pop-up restaurant. The full conversation is available on YouTube.

On April 23rd, 2025, I hosted a dinner set 30 years in the future. The dinner was inspired by Farma, a piece of speculative fiction I wrote back in October, imagining an eponymous food-tech forward restaurant in San Francisco. Tucked off Valencia Street in one of the city’s characteristic high-ceilinged Victorians, we brought Farma to life during SF Climate Week.

The menu proved out a meal informed by how our descendants might eat to support a food system less taxing on land, water, and energy. Importantly, this meal did not present a food-future rooted in archaism, with an emphasis on small-scale farming or regenerative agriculture as a means of conserving resources, but leaned into technologies that promise to support an abundant and scalable food system — extrusion, cellular agriculture, molecular gastronomy, and GMOs. It embodied the belief that technology and R&D, not romanticism, will change our diets.

Of course, this claim is simplistic. The foods we come to eat will not simply result from the inevitable march of technological progress. We must choose to bring them into being. And when they exist, we must also choose to embrace them. When milk pasteurization emerged in the late 1800s, for example, it was met with immediate backlash despite consensus from the scientific community that it effectively prevented contamination and disease. Anti-pasteurization advocates derided it as “dead milk,” arguing that the process diminished its nutritive value and would be used to mask a lower quality product, among other shortcomings. Owing to such outcry, the pasteurization of milk spread slowly despite demonstrable safety benefits. Interestingly, this debate rages on today, with none other than the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., criticizing the FDA's “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.

The story of pasteurization illustrates that the existence of a given food technology is not enough to make us adopt it. We must also find it persuasive. It is crucial, then, that we remember how persuasion works — appealing not only to logic, but character and emotion as well. When I moved to San Francisco, I had anticipated that its spirit of innovation and technological optimism might likewise characterize its food culture. So you can imagine my disappointment to discover this was more often shaped by fear and conservatism: fear of microplastics, lead, seed oils, GMOs, dyes, and chemicals — and conservatism about what constitutes a meal: preoccupation with animal-based protein, organic vegetables, and “whole foods.”

But far better than to debate what these ideas and anxieties get correct and where they fall short, is to demonstrate how our food culture could be otherwise. This is precisely what I did. With the help of Phil Saneski, a local chef specializing in progressive California cuisine, and his partner Emily Hopkins, a biologist and food-tech enthusiast, we designed a menu and curated speeches aimed at how to usher in positive food futures.

Subscribe now

In conceptualizing this meal, it was hard not to be enticed by far-futurism, and I spent hours with Phil and Emily discussing how avant-garde we wanted to make it. In the end, we agreed that in the spirit of climate week, it would be best to focus on what might actually move the needle — alternatives to what undergirds American diets: meat. Rather than pull people away from what is familiar, we elected to lean in, reenvisioning American staples such as chicken-fried steaks, sliders, meatballs, and bacon.

It was from this that we arrived at the theme “Green Americana,” fully embracing the trad aesthetics of a typical Thanksgiving, drive-through diner, or farm supper. “Picture Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom from Want, but with tofurky and cell-culture,” I said.

From gingham tablecloths to pineapple upside-down cake, we brought our gustatory past forward, while tethering the guests to dining that was familiar. This would not have been noteworthy, of course, without also weaving in the futurism. The pineapple in the upside-down cakes was GMO, and the honey in the Bee’s Knees mocktail was not made by bees but from microbial fermentation. Indeed, everything on the menu was not quite what it seemed: eggs that were spherilated tomatoes, cream sauce made from algae, meat derived from yeast, and all manner of mushrooms.

The storytelling throughout the evening was likewise rooted in such playfulness and forward-thinking. In her short speech on what it will take to empower alt-protein and cultured meat companies, Bianca Le of Mission Barns referred to how “generation Gamma,” born between the 2040s and when the dinner was set in 2055, would relate to this concept of “future food.” They would not have such a concept, she commented, “They would just have ‘food’.”

While I love the hopefulness underlying Le’s statement, I continue to wrestle with it. Even if cultured meat becomes a mainstay, there is bound to be another frontier. Maybe by 2055 we will have ready access to cultured beef, salmon, pork, and chicken, but what of more unusual fare? Perhaps by then, generation gamma will be cultivating cells from ancient DNA or DNA from celebrities (a concept only evinced satirically today). Perhaps they will be discussing “future water” from desalinated oceans or genetically modifying as-yet non-existent cultivars.1 Maybe the future of food turns to a different arena altogether, no longer focused on the table, but the medicine cabinet instead. As GLP-1s continue to proliferate, for example, what becomes of food? In such potential worlds, food may reduce to nutritive tablets — basic and functional. Or it might lean into the opposite — elaborate gourmet meals centered around individual bites.

Whatever the “future of food” holds, I believe it will be capacious. And while I hope it spells the end of “cheap meat,” it may, for other reasons, still include flesh from animals. In coming up with concepts for subsequent dinners, I began imagining a meal based on invasive species. Culinary cultures around the world already incorporate such foods, whether Asian Carp in the U.S. or locust “sky prawns” in Australia, but we could ramp this up as climate change continues to affect migratory patterns. For such a dinner, I envision discussing biocontrol over a whole menu comprised of invasive species from blackberries to tilapia and urchin. (If you are interested in seeing this idea come to fruition and want to help fund it, please reach out.)

This brings me back to perhaps the most gratifying part of the whole evening — that the dinner was instigated by a piece of speculative writing. When speaking with the chefs about my ultimate goal, I said, “That Farma really exists. That we see a restaurant in SF committed to food-technology as a thoroughgoing and all-encompassing theme.” And while this has not yet come to pass, the success of the dinner offers a compelling proof of concept.

Narratives are at the heart of all of this. They were central historically, as with the rebranding of lobsters from “marine cockroaches,” fit only for prisoners and servants, into a delicacy. And they are central today, observable in RFK’s regressive crusade against “ultra-processed food.” Rhetoric, writing, and storytelling thus present a very real opportunity to imagine how the world can look otherwise, and coax these changes into being — for better or for worse. Both Farma and Green Americana are efforts to instantiate a food future that isn’t rooted in fear but in plentitude and the belief that we, as eaters and innovators, can do better.

Acknowledgements: I want to give my thanks to Asimov Press’s funders, Asimov, Astera Institute, and Stripe, and to all the companies that supported us by sharing their products. I am also deeply grateful to chefs Phil Saneski and Emily Hopkins, speakers Bianca Le, Rebecca Chesney, and Shayna Fertig, the additional chef and staff support night of the event, and to the folks at Naked Kitchen. Finally, I could not have done this without the support and encouragement of my colleague Niko McCarty, Meera Zassenhaus (TUCCA), Iris Fung (designer), Kelsey Krach (photographer), and Itsi Weinstock, my partner in eating and life.

Xander Balwit is editor-in-chief of Asimov Press.

Cite: Balwit X. “A Night of Food Futurism.” Asimov Press (2025). https://doi.org/10.62211/23re-57wg

Tomorrow we launch the sixth issue of Asimov Press, which is our largest yet. We don’t typically send out these Editors’ Notes, but this time we have two important announcements to share.

First, we’re pleased to announce our partnership with Astera Institute, a private foundation dedicated to creating public goods that accelerate scientific and technological progress. Astera will support our editorial work for the next two years, allowing us to collaborate with more writers, artists, designers, and data visualization specialists than ever before. This funding will not only sustain our coverage of biological innovation but also enable us to expand into long-form explorations of how science itself operates.

A central component of this partnership involves establishing a dedicated metascience column. In 2025, we plan to commission about ten articles examining how scientific inquiry functions. In previous issues, we've begun exploring narrow aspects of how science is done — Dan Elton's examination of peer review's shortcomings or Saloni Dattani’s look into how death records shape public health come to mind — but now we aim to go much deeper. 

Starting this month, we will embed directly within scientific organizations, reporting firsthand on their methods, cultures, and results. We'll also investigate past and present metascience experiments, highlighting successes, failures, and ongoing innovations. Ultimately, our goal is to position Asimov Press as the leading magazine for long-form analysis of the scientific “machine”, culminating in a book-length compilation in the coming year.

Our metascience coverage will tackle questions like: What can alternative funding models teach us? Can we incentivize reform more effectively? How do tools like bioRxiv and Sci-Hub shape science? Who is experimenting with new ways of doing research? Through such questions, we want to explore not just the mechanics of science, but its purpose and potential. (If you're interested in writing about metascience, or you work at an organization that is experimenting in this space, please contact us at editors@asimov.com.)

Our second announcement, closely related to the first, is that we are hiring a part-time Researcher. This marks the first major expansion of our tiny team since launching more than a year ago. The Researcher will be a fully integrated part of our work; they will speak regularly with scientists and collect datasets for our "Data Briefs" series. Ideally, this individual will possess a strong understanding of biological sciences, a proficiency with data, and a talent for engaging deeply with scientific ideas. This role will begin as a three-month term, but we hope to expand it to a year (or permanently) if the fit is right. Click here to apply.

And now to Issue 6 … 

Our latest issue will open, tomorrow, with a memoir recounting one researcher’s journey from being diagnosed with a hereditary form of cancer to navigating IVF, undergoing a total gastrectomy, and grappling with moral decisions amidst limited data. Her story is, ultimately, about breaking an intergenerational cycle of grief.

Over the next two months, new essays will appear weekly to fill out the issue. Corrado Nai contributes a “biography” of a blood-red microbe, Serratia marcescens, which has left an outsized mark on our understanding of how germs disperse within human bodies, buildings, and populations.

And whereas Serratia was used for tracing pathogens outside the body, Smrithi Sunil looks at a fabled protein used internally — green fluorescent protein. Sunil untangles the history of GFP, recounting how it went from a jellyfish to a cursory mention in a scientific paper’s footnote and then into the freezer of almost every biology lab in the world.

Speaking of pervasiveness, Metacelsus offers an extensive book review of Nicholas Wade’s The Nobel Duel, which recounts the race between two endocrinologists — Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally — to discover the structures of hormones in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite being published 44 years ago, The Nobel Duel remains pertinent for helping us understand the (sometimes) combative forces that drive research.

The book review not only highlights gruesome details, such as how the men’s teams “ground up literally millions of animal hypothalami, dissected from hundreds of tons of brains” to uncover molecular structures, but also interrogates science’s highest honor itself, asking how we might reform the Nobel Prize.

And finally, for those drawn to the speculative, we’ll feature new science fiction. Xander Balwit follows an obituary writer in a future where biological death is largely obsolete, asking what remains significant in a world without mortality. These pieces will be joined by several others, including a photo essay with researchers working to build an AI scientist.

We hope you enjoy Issue 6. And thank you, as always, for reading our work and being a part of our community.

P.S. All of the books for our second anthology are nearly finished, after delays, and we will ship out all orders before the end of the month. Thanks for bearing with us as we get things right, and please email editors@asimov.com with any questions. Also, we are reviewing applications for our writing fellowship with Works in Progress, but it will take time to get through them all. We hope to reach out to prospective fellows by the end of April.

It’s been a little over a year since we launched Asimov Press. 

During that time, we released four issues of our digital magazine, printed and sold out of our first book, worked with dozens of writers, launched pre-orders for our second book, and published about 150,000 words of text.

All of this is possible because of you, our readers. Thank you for engaging, commenting, calling out our mistakes, and pushing us to publish better stories. As we enter 2025, we’ve noticed that our list of ideas has ballooned into the hundreds. We do not have the time or resources to pursue them all ourselves! So in the spirit of being open and bringing more ideas about scientific progress into the public realm, we are releasing our second list of Stories We’d Like to Publish.

If any of these ideas speak to you, please send an email to editors@asimov.com. Let us know why you’re a great person to tell this story and send some examples of prior non-academic writing (outlines are also welcome, so we can get a sense of how you might organize the article).

If we accept your pitch, we’ll support you during every step of the writing process, from outlining to copyediting to publishing. When the article is finished, we’ll also pay you and, perhaps, print your work in a forthcoming book. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to commission every pitch we receive.

Finally, if you don’t see an idea on this list that resonates with you, but still want to work with us — pitch us anyway! We are always looking for detailed and mechanistic stories covering biotechnology, the development of specific technologies and metascience, or arguments about how we can make science better or faster.

A Brief History of Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatories

Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) are among the most prescribed medications globally. This class of drug, which includes things like Aspirin and Ibuprofen, was estimated to have a market size of roughly $18,542.5 million in 2024, according to Cognitive Market Research. The same report suggested that in 2024, North America held a major market share, accounting for more than 40 percent of the global revenue, with a market size of $7,417.00 million. As the increasing prevalence of chronic pain conditions, an aging population, and a preference for over-the-counter pain management solutions make this market ever larger, we want to know the history (and contemporary discussions) surrounding this ubiquitous drug. We often forget to marvel at the basic medicine available to us today. However, it deserves acclaim. So whether you want to dive into NSAIDs, or other such “ordinary” and “commonplace” drugs, Asimov Press is looking to extoll the basics in the medicine cabinet. 

• A Brief History of Ibuprofen (The Pharmaceutical Journal)

The $100 Electron Microscope

Manu Prakash, a bioengineering professor at Stanford University, is trying to build a $100 electron microscope — a machine that can cost millions! We’d like to commission a short article about this project that briefly explains the history of electron microscopes, their manufacture, and Prakash’s confidence that a $100 version is possible. 

Dr. Prakash is one of our favorite scientists. His work is whimsical and joyful — done for the sake of discovery and play. His laboratory has also released other “frugal science” tools, including a paper microscope called FoldScope that costs less than a dollar to make and a 20-cent paper centrifuge, that might also be worth highlighting. (h/t David Lang)

• Manu Prakash (Stanford)

• Developing low cost vacuum pump to make electron microscope accessible to kids in classrooms (Experiment.com)

Plastic-Imitating Plants: An Investigation

Boquila trifoliolata is a vine native to South America. It appears, at first glance, much like any other vine. But B. trifoliolata actually has an uncanny ability: It can mimic the leaves of plants growing nearby. Even when scientists grow these South American vines near a plastic houseplant, the vine will change the shape and appearance of its leaves to mimic the plastic ones. Some scientists think that B. trifoliolata is able to mediate such mimicry not through physical touch or chemical signals but through a sort of “primitive vision.” In other words, some scientists believe that these vines actually mimic neighboring plants by sight. 

We want to publish a deep, investigative piece on this vine. The article should come to some sort of conclusion about whether or not these claims are likely to be true. We are also excited to see more coverage of plant intelligence and biology in general and would welcome other pitches on this subject.

• Boquila trifoliolata mimics leaves of an artificial plastic host plant (Plant Signaling and Behavior)

• Meet the Winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes (Ars Technica)

The State of Gene-Editing

There’s Cas9, Cas12, and Cas13. There are base editors, prime editors, and bridge recombinases. All of these tools work in slightly different ways and seem to be better or worse at slightly different functions.

We’d like to commission a visual essay (we’ll hire a scientific illustrator) that explains how these gene-editing tools actually work. The article will require a great deal of research into biophysical mechanisms and should also explain how each of these tools was invented, how they are being applied in the clinic (or elsewhere), and their efficiencies within the cell. We think the finished work could become a great and timeless resource for students!

• CRISPRpedia (Innovative Genomics)

• CRISPR Clinical Trials (CRISPR Medicine News)

The Genius of Gerolamo Cardano

A Renaissance polymath born in 1501, Gerolamo Cardano was among the first people “to attempt a systematic study of the calculus of probabilities,” as Prakash Gorroochurn, associate professor of biostatistics at Columbia University, has written. Cardano also invented the combination lock, introduced binomial coefficients, published more than 200 scientific papers during his lifetime, and was apparently “the first European mathematician to make systematic use of negative numbers.”

Unfortunately, most of Cardano’s genius seems to have been forgotten. Therefore, we’d like to publish a short biography of Cardano, explaining the circumstances that led to his development of probability theory. Apparently, he was often short of money, and kept himself solvent by gambling. This article could basically be a book review, drawing heavily upon quotes, similar to this biography on Warren Weaver or this one on Elon Musk. (In general, we welcome other pitches about formidable scientific minds, especially those that have been undersung.)

• Gerolamo Cardano (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

• Some Laws and Problems of Classical Probability and How Cardano Anticipated Them (Prakash Gorroochurn)

A Critique (or Defense) of GMOs

When we published a science fiction article about a fictional restaurant, called Farma, serving a pro-GMO menu, a couple of readers pushed back and suggested that we should have given more thorough treatment of arguments against GMOs.

Let’s do that. 

The safety of GMO crops has been debated for decades. Critics talk about health risks and the monopolization of seed supplies by large corporations. We’d like to commission an essay that systematically lays out all of the arguments against GMO crops and responds to them, one by one, with data supporting or refuting them. The essay should give equal weight to the benefits of GMOs, including increased crop yields and reduced pesticide use (if applicable).

• Genetically Modified Foods: Safety, Risks and Public Concerns—A Review (Journal of Food Science & Technology)

• The Environmental Impact of Genetically Modified Crops (Montana State University)

A Q&A with Ilan Gur

Why has the UK gone from one of the world’s leading scientific countries — inventing everything from early computers to molecular biology — to relative stagnation? How, exactly, might one turn the ship around and reinvigorate science? 

As CEO of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, turning the ship around is partially Ilan Gur’s job. Gur leads a team — one relatively insulated from bureaucratic oversight —  with £800m in funding earmarked to develop new science and technologies. Is he a new Warren Weaver or has something changed in modern science that makes it more difficult to forecast the future and predict the sources of breakthroughs? 

We’re hoping to commission a Q&A with Ilan Gur (or other figures spearheading efforts to accelerate scientific progress). The questions asked should be at least on par, in terms of depth and research, with those asked by someone like Dwarkesh Patel.

• ARIA

• Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again (WIRED)

A Look Inside FutureHouse

FutureHouse, based in San Francisco, is trying to build AI agents that can automate biology research. In a very short period, their team has released impressive tools — like PaperQA2 and LAB-Bench — to search the scientific literature or benchmark progress in AI tools for biology, respectively.

We want to commission a profile of FutureHouse that clearly explains what they are building, what the key bottlenecks are in AI tools for metascience, and how they prioritize problems. It could be similar to our prior article on Cultivarium (a non-profit building tools to engineer “weird” microbes). The article should also be more narrowly focused than this recent feature in Nature magazine.

• FutureHouse

Alternatives to Peer Review

We recently published a “Defense of Peer Review,” steelmanning some of the reasons why peer review — despite its bias, delays, and gatekeeping — is mostly a good thing overall. Whenever you go out on a limb and defend something that people widely decry, you’re sure to get some pushback! We definitely did.

In response, we’d like to expand our steelmanning and publish a piece that goes the next mile. In other words, we want to publish a manifesto, of sorts, that clearly outlines how, exactly, scientists would review papers in an “ideal world.” The article should explain where peer review currently fails and how we can make it better. It should be a defined and testable proposal. The article should focus on specific strategies, their potential impact, and what a reimagined system could look like to enhance transparency, efficiency, and trust in scientific communication.

• The Rise and Fall of Peer Review (Experimental History)

• A Defense of Peer Review (Asimov Press)

Automation Bottlenecks

Many people dream of a future where AI-powered robots run their own experiments, learn from the results, and make Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Anecdotal examples of this have already been published; for example, Carnegie Mellon scientists released Coscientist in 2023, a robot hooked up to ChatGPT that designs its own chemistry experiments to synthesize molecules. It seems to work really well!

Whether or not a similar robot could work for biology, however, remains to be seen. Biology is much harder to automate than chemistry. As Sam Rodriques has written: 

Chemistry may be all heat, weighing, and mixing, but keep in mind that we recently discovered after 6 months of investigation that one of the projects in my lab was failing because a chemical that was leaching out of a rubber gasket in one of our cell culture wells was interfering with an enzymatic reaction.

If biological research is ever to be fully automated, then, a robot must “be able to pick up the Petri dish and notice that there is some oily residue floating on the surface that isn’t supposed to be there. Until then, humans will probably stay significantly in the loop.”

We’d like to commission an article that walks through the various bottlenecks hindering biological research automation and highlights some of the people and companies working to solve them.

• Autonomous Chemical Research with Large Language Models (Nature)

• Interview With Erika DeBenedictis (Federation of American Scientists)

The Quest for a Strep A Vaccine

There is no licensed vaccine to prevent strep A infections, which kills perhaps a thousand people yearly in the United States. That is a small number relative to other infectious diseases, but one of the reasons a strep A vaccine is intriguing is because making one will be incredibly difficult; there are more than 200 types of bacteria that cause strep A, each carrying unique M proteins on their cell walls. And because strep A is somewhat rare, there aren’t major financial incentives to make preventative treatments.

We’d like to commission an article about strep A vaccines because many of the lessons gleaned from the piece will apply to other neglected diseases. The piece could be similar in style to, say, our recent article about tuberculosis vaccines (h/t Jacob Trefethen).

• Strep A: Challenges, Opportunities, Vaccine-Based Solutions, and Economics (npj Vaccines)

• Update on Group A Streptococcal Vaccine Development (Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases)

Discoveries Ignored: Part II

Scientific history is replete with stories of scientists who made important discoveries but were ultimately overlooked or rejected, only to be recognized later. In 2020, José Luis Ricón published an excellent article highlighting some of these examples:

• Jet engines, invented in 1937, were “stalled” by NASA’s precursor organization because administrators were “very pessimistic” about the technology.

• Katalin Karikó, a key inventor of mRNA vaccines, had trouble getting funding for her work and almost quit science.

• When Paul Boyer discovered how ATP energy molecules are made by a cell, the Journal of Biological Chemistry declined to publish it.

• Kary Mullis’ paper describing polymerase chain reaction was rejected by both Science and Nature.

And so on. José has already done an excellent job, but we’d love to publish stories that either round up other “scientific rejections” or delve more deeply into individual examples. We think that, by doing so, we can reassure scientists that their work is important even when unappreciated by the powers that be!

• Peer Rejection in Science (Nintil)

Inside White Labs

White Labs, a bar with locations in San Diego and Asheville, looks similar to any other “hip” craft brewery. But if you look a bit more closely, you’ll quickly discover that they don’t only make beer, they also make the yeast that makes that beer. White Labs has developed 96 new yeast strains since 2015. Each strain has unique brewing properties; some can survive high pressures or high alcohol concentrations in the fermentation tank, whereas others exude particular flavors. We’re interested in White Labs because they are selling “human-modified” organisms directly to consumers, and that is somewhat rare.

We’d like to publish a photo essay that takes readers inside White Labs and explains their process for making new yeast strains. The piece should showcase their laboratories, fermentation rooms, and various beer batches.

• White Labs

Inside a Synthetic Silk Factory

A few different companies are making synthetic silk from engineered cells, including AMSilk, Spiber, and Bolt Threads. Similar to the photo essay on White Labs, we’d like to commission a photographer and writer to go inside one of these silk-making factories and explain how it works. How are the cells engineered to make silk? How do they get the silk proteins out of them? How are these proteins then woven into actual textiles? And, importantly, why has it been so difficult for biomaterials to scale and get into the hands of everyday consumers?

• I Grew Real Spider Silk Using Yeast (The Thought Emporium)

• Production of Synthetic Spider Dragline Silk Protein in Pichia pastoris (Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology)

The Beauty of Cellular Noise

If you take two identical cells — same genomes, same number of plasmids, grown in the same environment — and peer at them beneath a microscope, you may begin to notice something strange: They differ, randomly, in their gene expression. In other words, each cell turns different genes on-and-off at different times.

This phenomenon is known as “cellular noise.” And, far from being a nuisance, these random fluctuations help populations of cells to quickly adapt to changing environments. Michael Elowitz's group at Caltech has published a great deal of work on cellular noise, and their papers have been seminal for understanding how organisms leverage it to survive.

We’d like to publish an essay celebrating cellular noise. This is quite open-ended, but the piece could explore why noise evolved (i.e. why it’s advantageous for cells to operate via stochastic, rather than deterministic, mechanisms), how it operates in organisms like E. coli, and how synthetic biologists are hijacking it to make more robust biological systems.

• Stochastic Gene Expression in a Single Cell (Science)

• Functional Roles for Noise in Genetic Circuits (Nature)

Why Do Biologists Accept Experimental Failure?

Experiments in biology fail all the time. Even a technique as common as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, often has to be repeated twice or thrice before it works reliably. If you ask a biologist why this is, most will shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s just how it goes. Biology is messy!”

Biologists have accepted that few experiments work the first time. But does this need to be the case? Experiments should of course fail if a hypothesis is false, but why should they fail when the phenomena in question is true?

Having a tolerance for failure slows scientific progress. Experiments should be designed for success and replicability, yet the field seems resigned to inefficiency. We’d like to publish a short essay or op-ed about this issue, exploring why biologists accept failure and how we might nudge the culture toward a more exacting mentality. (h/t Erika Alden DeBenedictis)

The Fallacy of Engineering Intelligence

We attended several events in 2024 wherein participants ask us, “What are the existing bottlenecks for engineering human intelligence?” 

A blogger who goes by the alias GeneSmith has outlined several strategies to boost adult intelligence using gene editing. He aims to do this in the next 20 years, purportedly to stay ahead of AI timelines (and basically help ensure that humans can “keep up” with superintelligence.) His ideas have caught on and spread through the rationalist community, where many people seem to accept them at face value.

We’d like to commission an essay that critically examines GeneSmith’s claims, and walks through the existing bottlenecks limiting our ability to precisely, safely, or ethically augment human intelligence. We’d also be glad to commission a dialogue between GeneSmith and one of his critics. The essay should, at a minimum, touch on three things: Why it’s so difficult to choose genetic targets, why it’s difficult to deliver gene-editing payloads to specific parts of the brain, and why it’s difficult to avoid messing stuff up elsewhere in the body in the process (let alone getting clearance to run clinical trials).

• Superbabies: Putting The Pieces Together (Sarah Constantin)

Rise of the Sewer

In 1858, London was blanketed by an odor so putrescent that it earned the moniker “The Great Stink.” The smell rose from the Thames, the river connecting the city to the English Channel and international trade routes beyond. According to some, like the legendary novelist Charles Dickens, it was not so much a river as “a deadly sewer.” As tides pushed rotting sewage, offal, and industrial waste back upstream, it stagnated and festered. Waterborne diseases abounded: between 1831 and 1854, cholera killed over 40,000 people in London across four major outbreaks.



It took over two decades, six million pounds, and the efforts of the visionary civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to finally subdue the stench and clean up London’s water. Today, wastewater treatment is one of the many modern comforts that has gone from miraculous to the mundane. By gaining a greater understanding of the infrastructure, engineering, and science involved in the collection and management of sewage, we can better appreciate what it takes to preserve public health.

We want to commission an essay that celebrates sewage. What stories can we tell about its management? When did we begin to lean into wastewater monitoring as a key part of epidemiological research? Which disease outbreaks, civic developments, or lesser-known figures have been lost in the bowels of history?

• The Great Stink (Cholera and the Thames)

• The Story Of Sir Joseph Bazalgette & The Sewers Of London

• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

Public Health Hysterias

When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was surrounded by fear, misinformation, and stigma, especially due to its initial high prevalence in marginalized communities. In 1981, the New York Times published an article about a “rare cancer observed in 41 homosexuals,” setting off a firestorm of public health hysteria. We know now that this disease was not cancer, or any other kind of mysterious gay “syndrome,” but rather a viral infection that attacks the immune system. 
There have been many other public health panics, from “Mad Cow Disease” to “Fluoridated Water.” And while these are often accompanied by public fear and speculation, they can also catalyze meaningful scientific advancements.

We would like to see some pieces that explore public health hysteria, especially those instances that have driven real reform. What can we learn from how health information (or disinformation) spreads and takes root in the public imagination?

• A Great Public Health Conspiracy? (Will Koehrsen)

• The Anti-Fluoride Movement Vaults Into the Mainstream (The New York Times)

Surgical Progress

A few decades ago, gallbladder removal required an open surgical procedure with a large abdominal incision, resulting in significant pain, a lengthy hospital stay, and a recovery period of up to six weeks. With laparoscopic techniques — also known as “keyhole surgery,” because surgeons are now able to peer into the abdomen using minimal incisions — gallbladder removal has become significantly simpler. 

There are many such cases of surgical innovation. Over the course of a century, laparoscopy transformed once invasive and dangerous surgeries, from egg retrieval for IVF to hernia repair, into minor procedures. Other surgical domains, such as various thoracic procedures, have been modernized by the addition of robots, which similarly aid doctors in precision and delicacy. That surgeries are getting safer and more innovative thrills us, and we are interested in commissioning pieces both about what more is on the horizon and how we got here. Is there a surgical tool with an improbable history? Is there a technique with a wild development history? Do you have an argument for how computer vision will transform the trajectory of surgery? How has a surgical technique invented in one context come to pervade others? Do advancements in cosmetic and aesthetic surgeries drive innovation elsewhere? 

• The Invention of Surgery (Dr. Dave Schneider)

Sleep Biology

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the eponymous protagonist was challenged by the Mesopotamian king Utnapishtim to stay awake for 6 days and 7 nights in order to achieve immortality. He was unable to do so. Apparently, humans are captive to their sleep cycles even if godhood is on offer.

In ideal circumstances, our circadian rhythms work well and regulate our hormonal cycles and mood. Other times, we’re plagued by insomnia and our health suffers, or we wish to overcome the constraints of our natural sleep cycles and stay alert for longer periods to be more productive. Are scientists any closer to being able to tinker with this cycle? A 2017 article reported that “scientists report that increasing the level of Bmal1 — a critical master gene that regulates sleep patterns — in skeletal muscle makes mice resistant to sleep deprivation.” A 2019 study identified a gene in a family that needs less sleep than others. 

What other discoveries might move us closer to being able to regulate our sleep cycles at the molecular level without damaging our health?

• The Brain, Circadian Rhythms, and Clock Genes (British Medical Journal)

The Future of Pigment

From the Tyrian purple that signaled social status, sourced from the mucus of murex sea snails, to carmine dye used in textiles and paintings, sourced from cochineal scale insects, human beings have long been fascinated by pigment. 

They have more than just an aesthetic and economic dimension. Fungal pigments have been proposed as a means of reducing the toxic impact of chemical dyeing and cool paint as a means of reducing temperatures in urban areas. And the genetics of plant pigments are even suggesting ways to boost the nutritional disease resistance and the nutritional value of food. 

From interesting applications of pigment in biosensors and medical imaging to stories of its synthesis and derivation, we want to know more about this human obsession with insoluble color. 

• Natural Pigments of Bacterial Origin and Their Possible Biomedical Applications (Microorganisms)

• Biotechnological Advances for Improving Natural Pigment Production (Bioresources and Bioprocessing)

• The Most Expensive Colours and Rarest Pigments in the World (Marina Viatkina)

Effect of Lab Space on Scientific Progress

Sam Bowman, the indefatigable YIMBY and our friend at Works in Progress, was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast discussing the impact that lab space shortages might have on science and innovation. Host Rob Wiblin supplied the fact that “in London, there’s 90,000 square feet of lab space available; in the Boston area, there’s 14 million square feet of lab space.” This, Sam fears, may be what is stifling science in the UK. After all, Boston is virtually synonymous with biotechnology. He elaborates:

So when lab space is there, you may end up getting much more radical, innovative, bold experimentation alongside the stuff that we’re paying for. When lab space is constrained, you’re just going to get the kind of boring, conventional, move the world forward by a tiny fraction of an inch kind of work — that sadly we fund, and sadly we are prone to that kind of risk-averse type of work.

But the knock-on effect of lab space shortages could be that there is a considerable constraint on the kind of science that we want to get done. I think that’s really, really fascinating, if true.

It is an enormous hypothesis, and we also want to know if it is true. We would be keen to have someone do empirical/investigative research into this in an attempt to draw some connection between having the infrastructure to actually conduct science and scientific output. However, we know this is a massive question and are also generally interested in the effect that labs (their location, formality, architecture, etc.) have had on research historically. We are open to a range of responses to this and hope it gets people thinking!

• This tweet from Sam Bowman

• 80,000 Hours Transcript

A Brief History of … Anything

Every tool and technique in science has a story. Usually, that story involves some combination of human ingenuity and iterative design. We’re interested in publishing “brief histories” (~3,500 words) that unearth the journeys behind biology’s most influential devices — from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s handmade microscope, to the modern electron microscope, to the bioreactor. How, exactly, did these inventions come to be? Which idiosyncratic characters shaped their paths? How did early prototypes evolve through time, and who championed their refinement?

• Making the Micropipette (Asimov Press)

• A Brief History of Parafilm (Asimov Press)

Digital Scents

In decades past, scientists invented technologies to transmit images, sound, and even sense of touch in various experimental forms — but scent has long been stubbornly confined to the physical world. But Osmo, a company that spun out of Google Research labs, is now trying to give computers a “sense of smell.” They recently “teleported” a smell across a lab using a blend of chromatography, AI, and a molecular reconstitution device. Their process has advanced from analyzing a slice of coconut to transmitting complex odors with increasing fidelity. By mapping molecules in the air, uploading them to a “Principal Odor Map,” and then reassembling them on the other side, Osmo has demonstrated how to digitize scents.

This raises a lot of questions, of course: How does one even “map” a scent? Which molecules are the hardest to capture, and which remain unknown? What does it mean for art, communication, and commerce if a singular aroma can be recorded and reproduced across continents? We’re commissioning stories that either dive headfirst into Osmo’s technology or explore the broader science of smell. Why has digitizing scent proven so difficult?

• Scent Teleportation Update: We Did It! (Osmo)

Biotechnology in China

China’s biotech scene is changing fast but is poorly understood by American audiences. We’re looking to hire a columnist to contribute regular (perhaps monthly) articles on China’s biotechnology scene, including startups in cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen. Each column will be relatively short — ideally less than 2,000 words — and we’ll pay you exceptionally well for your contributions. We’re especially keen to hire someone with firsthand access to labs. We’ll provide support for travel, too.

Antivenom Production

Snakebites kill on the order of 100,000 people worldwide each year, especially in regions with limited access to quality healthcare and lifesaving antivenom. Behind every small vial of antivenom is a fascinating — and often overlooked — production pipeline, involving the collection of venom through tedious immunization protocols, all the way to the purification processes that render the final treatments. 

We want to commission a photo essay that takes readers inside an antivenom production facility. If you’re a writer eager to explore snakebites, we’ll connect you with a photographer. If you’re a photographer keen on documenting this story, we’ll help match you with a writer. Beyond this specific topic, we’re always open to proposals for photo essays on other facets of biotechnology.

• Meet the Flower Designer Who Built a Laboratory In His Home (Asimov Press)

• How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine (The New York Times)

The book is an ode to scientific progress, and the articles within tell stories about everything from the origins of synthetic biology to the discovery of an antimalarial drug in China and the invention of the micropipette. Other essays tell of a scientist's seven-year effort to engineer ants and decipher the neurons underlying their communication, or attempt to answer the question: If phages are so good at killing microbes, why aren’t they used to treat antibiotic-resistant infections in the West?

The books were designed by Everything Studio in Brooklyn (the same studio behind Cabinet Magazine) and printed by Shapco in Minneapolis. They are printed on high-quality, cougar white vellum paper with Smyth-sewn bindings. The cover depicts a repressilator, the synthetic gene circuit that Elowitz first published in 2000, and is foil-stamped to provide some texture. There are eight pages of color photographs in each book, with additional images scattered throughout.

We recently published an essay highlighting our printing costs and other lessons learned from starting a magazine. You can read that here. All profits from sales of these books will be donated to Malaria Consortium, an organization that vaccinates children against malaria. We printed a total of 1,200 copies and have sold about half of them in the last two days. We’ll package orders by hand and ship them out next week. If you are based outside the U.S. and would like to place an order, please email editors@asimov.com.

Issue 03 of Asimov Press will launch in early June with an excellent piece by Alex Telford. Please keep an eye out for that. And thank you, sincerely, for reading and supporting our work.

Purchase the Book

Asimov Press has now existed for two months. (Woo!) We’re publishing an essay at a pace of roughly one per week, and our first printed compilation will be available in May.

But there are only two of us (Niko & Xander), and our pile of essay ideas has already swelled to 450+ rows in a spreadsheet. At our current publishing cadence, it will take us about nine years to tell all of these stories—and new ideas are being added every day. We’d like to launch more biotechnology stories into the universe, but we need your help to make that happen.

That’s why we are publicly sharing ideas for essays that we’d like to publish. If you’d like to pursue any of these, please email us: editors@asimov.com. We’re willing to work with both new and experienced writers; just let us know in your email why you might be the best person to write on the topic you’ve chosen. Examples of past work are also welcome. We’ll help you during every step of the writing process, from outline to drafts to editing. And then, to top it off, we’ll pay you, print your article in an upcoming essay collection, and invite you to attend one of our semi-annual launch parties.

Open-sourcing essay ideas is not an original idea. Our decision to do this was inspired by the Institute for Progress, an organization that publicly lists pieces that they’d “like to commission” or would “like to see out in the world.” It’s a great way to encourage readers to become writers. Arcadia Science does something similar with their Ice Box series, a collection of publicly accessible projects “that have been paused, or ‘put on ice.’”

At Asimov Press, our mission is to spread ideas that elucidate the promise of biotechnology, take its concomitant risks seriously, and direct talent toward solving pressing problems. As part of this mission, we’re seeking pieces that are mechanistic, quantitative, and nuanced. Stories should give enough detail to help readers understand which problems need to be solved and how we might arrive at solutions. We want this to be participatory, so please, let us know if there are any great ideas out there that we’ve missed. This list will be regularly updated.

Story Ideas

The Making of Loyal (Commissioned)

The longevity drug, LOY-001, is the first to receive “formal acceptance” from the F.D.A. Center for Veterinary Medicine for a drug “developed and approved to extend lifespan.” The startup behind it spent four years establishing a new regulatory path to bring lifespan extension drugs to market. But why has it historically been difficult to do this, and how can animal trials open up approvals for similar drugs for humans in the near future? What is the current state of the longevity drug market, and what do we know about how these drugs actually work?

Related: 

1. FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine agrees Loyal’s data supports reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension. Link

Where’s the Synthetic Blood? (Commissioned)

Blood transfusions are widely needed in medical and surgical interventions. But we still rely on people to donate their own blood for others, which seems like a strangely out-of-date practice. Blood is difficult to store for long periods of time and hence needs constant donation, and some rarer blood types are often in short supply.

What have been the major scientific attempts to develop synthetic blood, and why they haven't succeeded yet? Thanks to Saloni Dattani for the recommendation.

Related:

1. ABO gene editing for the conversion of blood type A to universal type O in Rhnull donor‐derived human‐induced pluripotent stem cells. Link

2. Toward universal donor blood: Enzymatic conversion of A and B to O type. Link

3. Artificial Blood Product One Step Closer to Reality With $46 Million in Federal Funding. Link

The First Patented GMOs (Commissioned)

Ananda Chakrabarty, a genetic engineer at General Electric, was the first person to file a patent application for a genetically-altered organism in 1972 for a microbe engineered to clean up oil spills more rapidly than wildtype strains alone. We’d like to commission a brief history of this event and the court cases that followed. The article should clearly explain how the court decisions paved the way for the formal establishment of the biotechnology industry. 

Related: 

1. Court Rules GE Can Patent Life Created in a Lab. Link

2. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980). Link

Biotechnology for Animal Welfare: Quantified

Animal suffering, particularly that which occurs as a result of factory-farming, is an issue that we’re certain future generations will look back on and say: Why did people allow this to continue? Unfortunately, it’s difficult to measure how many animals actually suffer and how much. But quantifying a problem is often the first step toward initiating impactful solutions. 

More than 100 billion animals are killed for meat and other animal-derived products every year and there is a staggering number of wild animals that face disease, starvation, and predation in natural and urban environments. There have been attempts to quantify the number of animals in the wild, although this task is riddled with difficulties. 97 percent of living organisms are invertebrates and the estimated number of insects alone is 10 quintillion, with the majority of species still undiscovered.

Biotechnology offers many interventions against animal suffering.1 It has been used to spare cattle from the painful dehorning and to immuno-castrate pigs. It’s also used to sex chickens in-ovo which, while still a nascent technology, could save ~7 billion male chicks a year from maceration. We want to see more writing about what is possible in this space and what the bottlenecks are. While there is a role for fiction that imagines worlds in which animal agriculture is more humane, uncovering extant or near-term biotechnological solutions that are feasible, tractable, and economical is the way to actually bring about change. 

Related: 

1. Animal Welfare Library. Link

2. Animal Welfare - Rethink Priorities. Link

3. Improving Genomic Selection for Heat Tolerance in Dairy Cattle: Current Opportunities and Future Directions. Link

4. Biotechnology Could Change the Cattle Industry. Will it Succeed? Link

5. A Scenario Analysis for Implementing Immunocastration as a Single Solution for Piglet Castration. Link

Real-Time Air Sensors

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a glaring hole in our diagnostic capabilities; namely, we’re too slow at—and need too much skilled labor—to diagnose sick people. Fortunately, new technologies could help to rapidly detect future outbreaks of influenza, coronaviruses, and other viral pathogens. In the last year, several papers have reported real-time surveillance technologies that detect pathogens in aerosols.

These devices, once installed in a home or hospital room, suck in air, collect pathogens into micro-wells, and then use sensitive biosensors and electronic systems to quantify circulating pathogens. We’d like to publish an in-depth look at how these new real-time surveillance tools work, where they fail, and what bottlenecks must be overcome to make them more widely accessible.

Related: 

1. Real-time environmental surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 aerosols. Link

2. Air monitor detects airborne virus particles in real time. Link

3. Towards Real-Time Airborne Pathogen Sensing. Link

The Challenge of Artificial Wombs

Artificial wombs simulate the uterus’ internal environment. They are already used, in some cases, to help premature babies born between 22 and 28 weeks to develop outside the womb. They have even broader ethical and social implications when it comes to the future of fertility. We’d like to publish a piece that elegantly explains how artificial wombs work and why it has been difficult to make technologies that can accommodate the full developmental span of an embryo, including before 22 weeks.

Related: 

1. Human trials of artificial wombs could start soon. Here’s what you need to know. Link

2. Artificial womb technology and the frontiers of human reproduction: conceptual differences and potential implications. Link

Seeding the Universe

In 1948, John von Neumann described the Universal Assembler, a type of self-replicating machine. A Universal Assembler is a machine that can reproduce itself using resources in its local environment; a feat that living cells accomplish all the time. Could living cells be used to construct von Neumann probes—or self-replicating spacecrafts—that, when launched out into the Universe, could land on distant planets, replicate, and colonize their surfaces? We want to publish a piece that explains the current state of biological nanoprobes, how they work, and any technical or ethical challenges limiting their implementation.

Related:

1. Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering. Link

Biotechnology for Chick Culling

About 7 billion male chicks are culled each year in the egg industry. Males do not lay eggs, so the baby chicks are tossed into large blenders while still alive. Watch the videos for yourself if you dare. There is perhaps no greater opportunity for biotechnology to reduce superfluous animal pain and suffering than in creating solutions that eliminate chick culling. A deep dive article on this issue would explore in-ovo sexing, engineered chickens that lay eggs from which only females can hatch, and related technologies. The article should deeply explore economic and societal questions, too, including the question of why the egg industry (in the United States) hasn’t yet implemented technologies that already exist and are implemented elsewhere, and what it would cost them.

Related: 

1. In-Ovo Sexing Overview. Link

2. The SELEGGT process – gender identification in the hatching egg. Link

Speeding Up Cell Division

All applications in biotechnology flow downstream from engineered cells. So why is the field limited to working with organisms that only divide every 20 or 30 minutes (in the case of microbes) or every few hours (in the case of mammalian cells)? Some microbes, such as Vibrio natriegens, divide every ten minutes. Can we engineer organisms that divide even faster? What would be required to do that, what are the concomitant dangers, and to which applications could these ‘turbocharged’ cells be applied?

Related: 

1. Fundamental limits on the rate of bacterial growth and their influence on proteomic composition. Link

2. Metabolic engineering of Vibrio natriegens. Link

DNA Assembly Bottlenecks

DNA synthesis has received a great deal of attention, and for good reason. In the 1960s, scientists invented solid-state synthesis methods to build short oligonucleotide sequences in a laborious, painstaking process. But in 2021, a company reported the first synthesis of a single strand of DNA that stretched more than 10,000 bases in length. In the next five years, DNA printers—machines that sit on a desk and physically print DNA molecules—will be able to synthesize DNA strands that stretch between five and seven thousand bases, according to estimates from the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

There has been far less attention devoted to DNA assembly. What is the most advanced way to stitch together lots of DNA sequences into, say, an entire genome? Why is this feat difficult, how might we make it possible to design, assemble and debug a full E. coli genome in one or two days, and how can we minimize the concomitant biosecurity risks? 

Related: 

1. DNA synthesis technologies to close the gene writing gap. Link

2. Benchtop DNA Synthesis Devices: Capabilities, Biosecurity Implications, and Governance. Link

Animal Birth Control

While surgical sterilization is the mainstay of pet population control, and poisons are the mainstay of pest population control, we are curious if we can do better. We’d like to publish a piece that examines reproductive control agents that have a biotechnology bent to them, including efforts in domestic cats and rodent populations. Just how feasible, expensive, and humane are they? And can they be applied more broadly?

Related: 

1. Durable contraception in the female domestic cat using viral-vectored delivery of a feline anti-Müllerian hormone transgene. Link

2. The rodent birth control landscape. Link

DNA Screening Algorithms

Computer algorithms that sift through DNA sequences and detect possibly pathogenic sequences are an effective way to restrict access to would-be bioterrorists. But no federal mandates describe how these algorithms should work, exactly, or what sequences they must screen for. Many DNA synthesis providers basically “do their own thing,” although a recent Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence will mandate that researchers who receive federal funds only purchase DNA that has been screened. The same Order will also introduce “screening mechanisms, including standards and incentives.” 

We don’t want to publish information hazards, but we do want to publish a piece that examines how DNA screening algorithms actually work and how they could be made better.

Related: 

1. Highlights of the 2023 Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence for Congress. Link

2. Secure DNA. Link

3. Preventing the Misuse of DNA Synthesis Technology. Link

Synthetic Nitrogen Fixation

About 120 million metric tons of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are made each year. Production of one ton of ammonia for such fertilizer, using natural gas, emits 1.6 tons of carbon dioxide. Farmers in the U.S. use about 72 kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare of land, according to Our World in Data, and there are 166 million hectares of cropland in the U.S. This means that the U.S. alone uses more than 13 million tons of fertilizer each year. 

If plants could fix their own nitrogen—rather than rely on farmers’ use of synthetic fertilizers—we could slash global carbon emissions by billions of tons over a few years. The New Yorker recently ran an article on synthetic nitrogen fixation, but it did not cover alternative approaches to achieve the same ends, such as the use of engineered microbes that are planted with the seeds and provide nitrogen to the developing plant via symbiotic interactions (see Pivot Bio). We’d like to publish a mechanistic piece that examines synthetic nitrogen fixation, why it is difficult, and other strategies to curb our reliance on synthetic fertilizers.

Related: 

1. Will Plants Ever Fertilize Themselves? Link

2. Pivot Bio. Link

Moore’s Law for Synthetic Gene Circuits

The first synthetic gene circuits—the toggle switch and repressilator—were made from just two or three genes, respectively. More recently, researchers have made synthetic gene circuits from 11 genes or, in another instance, from 62 genes spread out over 7 microbial strains. We’d like to publish a piece that traces the steadily growing size of synthetic gene circuits over time and explains why it may be difficult to scale them further. Why is it difficult to make large circuits that work as expected? Is it because we lack appropriate mathematical models, or because transgenes simply impose too much “burden” on the cells in which they are placed, or something else? 

Related: 

1. Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli. Link

2. A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators. Link

3. Genetic circuit design automation. Link

4. Programming Escherichia coli to function as a digital display. Link

Making Pan-Vaccines

Current vaccines typically offer narrow protection against pathogens, such as influenza. As pathogens evolve and mutate, though, they can find ways to evade that protection, thus requiring that people get vaccinated repeatedly. In the last few years, dozens of research groups have begun developing pan-genus or pan-family virus vaccines. We’d like to publish a deep dive that explains how pan-vaccines for influenza actually work, how they are faring in clinical trials, and any challenges associated with their widespread rollout. A vaccine called M2e has been touted as a possible candidate for universal influenza protection for more than two decades now, but it requires “several administrations,” according to an article in PNAS, and does not effectively sustain “antibody titers over time.” What are the other options?

Related: 

1. A single-shot vaccine approach for the universal influenza A vaccine candidate M2e. Link

2. Quadrivalent Influenza Vaccine. Link

3. Mosaic RBD nanoparticles protect against challenge by diverse sarbecoviruses in animal models. Link

4. Broad-spectrum pan-genus and pan-family virus vaccines. Link

The Difficulties with Tree Engineering

One-third of emitted carbon annually is captured and sequestered in forests. Trees are thus a promising avenue for carbon capture. Yet, Jack Wang, a tree engineer at North Carolina State University, estimates that there are fewer than 1,000 tree geneticists working today and only a few dozen people who actually know how to genetically engineer trees. We’d like to publish a piece that clearly explains why it is so challenging to engineer trees compared to crop plants and that highlights companies working in this space, such as TreeCo and Living Carbon. 

Related: 

1. For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest. Link

2. Tree-Co. Link

3. Living Carbon. Link

4. Genetically edited wood could make paper more sustainable. Link

Costs of Cultivated Meat

The first burger made from cultivated meat debuted in 2013 and cost $330,000. Now, more than a decade later, this cost has fallen to about $9.80 a burger. A recent economic assessment suggests that the price of cultivated meat could come down to roughly ​​$5.00 per kilo by 2030. But despite falling costs, pessimism about the future of cultivated meats abounds. Putting aside people’s feelings about broken promises and interindustry flubs, we want to publish a piece that explains how cultivated meat came down so far in price, and what exactly is limiting it from falling even further. This piece would be part history, part quantitative analysis.

Related: 

1. Is Cultivated Meat for Real? Link

2. The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner. Link

3. Leveraging Biopharma Production Processes for Cultivated Meat. Link

4. These Cities Aren’t Banning Meat. They Just Want You to Eat More Plants. Link

Key Biotechnology Numbers

Lists of numbers are a surprisingly effective way to help people think through ideas and identify obstacles. A friend of Asimov Press, Milan Cvitkovic, previously published a list of “Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing.” He divided his list into sections about the brain, individual cells, hardware, and even operational concerns (such as: “A cage of 5 mice costs ~$1k upfront and ~$5k/yr recurring.”)

We’d like to publish similar lists of numbers, albeit for other facets of biotechnology. What numbers would be on a list of “Drug Numbers Worth Knowing” or “Synthetic Biology Numbers Worth Knowing”?

Related: 

1. Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing. Link

The Protein Problem

Historically, most protein structures have been solved using x-ray crystallography, a technique in which proteins are removed from cells, packed into crystals, and then bombarded with x-ray beams. A sensor, placed behind the crystal, catches the diffracted x-rays, and the diffraction patterns are used to calculate the three-dimensional structure of the protein. This method erroneously portrays proteins as static, unmoving objects.

AlphaFold2, the computational model that predicts protein structures, was trained mostly on protein structures solved with x-ray crystallography. Proteins in cells behave more like liquids than solids, though; they wiggle to-and-fro in a chaotic dance and can adopt hundreds of distinct shapes. If one reverses AlphaFold’s predictions and instead makes the model generative, it tends to design proteins that are hyper-stable and rigid, much like the frozen proteins on which it was trained.

The question is: What technologies could enable one to “solve” protein structures—in all their wiggly variants—inside of living cells? We’re familiar with laboratories in Denmark that are working to develop in situ cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that would provide high-resolution structures of proteins without first pulling them from cells. We’d like to publish a piece that explains how these technologies work, and how they could make computationally-designed proteins more resemble the real things.

Related: 

1. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Link

2. AlphaFold2 and its applications in the fields of biology and medicine. Link

3. De novo protein design by inversion of the AlphaFold structure prediction network. Link

4. ANewInSituCryo-ElectronMicroscopyApproachtoDirectly Visualize Mutations in Mitochondrial Disease. Link

5. In situ cryo-electron tomography: a new method to elucidate cytoplasmic zoning at the molecular level. Link

Why Do Xenotransplants (Actually) Fail?

In January 2022, a 57-year-old man named David Bennett received an organ transplant: a heart from a genetically-edited pig. The pig heart was placed into Mr. Bennett’s chest and functioned normally for a time, but then everything went wrong. Bennett passed away that March. 

At any given time, there are more than 100,000 people in the United States waiting on an organ transplant list. Organs harvested from engineered pigs could help to reduce this number, but xenotransplants have never worked in living people for an extended period of time. Pig-to-nonhuman primate transplants, however, have lasted >900 days for heart transplants and >400 days for kidney transplants. Although Bennett’s heart transplant likely failed because the organ was infected with a pig virus, according to an article in MIT Technology Review, we’d still like to know why xenotransplants have been so challenging to get right. An article should clearly explain how pigs are genetically altered to become organ donors, and what happens to a person’s immune system when pig organs are placed inside the body.

Related: 

1. A Brief History of Clinical Xenotransplantation. Link

2. How Close Is Xenotransplantation, Really? Link

3. Xenotransplantation: Past, Present, and Future. Link

4. The Xenotransplant Patient Who Died Received a Heart Infected with a Pig Virus. Link

Predictive Growth Models

Theodor Escherich, an Austrian physician, was the first to isolate E. coli (from his own feces) in 1885. This simple microbe is now used as the organism-of-choice for nearly 15,000 biomedical research studies each year. Scientists tend to use E. coli because it is easy to work with and genetically tractable. But there are other microbes that grow in hydrothermal vents or survive in the vacuum of space—beautiful biology is just waiting to be discovered, if only we could grow and study such microbes in the laboratory.

We’d like to publish a piece that imagines how a predictive model, which infers the optimal growth nutrients for any microbe solely by looking at its genome sequence, could actually come to be. Such a sequence-to-growth model would vastly broaden the organisms that can be studied and might make it possible to concoct an “optimal broth” to grow a greater number of organisms. Small models can already tackle a modest version of this problem, but it’ll be a tall order to collect enough data to build a broadly general version. What datasets will be required? And how might biotechnology change as a result?

Related: 

1. What Biology Can Learn from Physics. Link

2. Machine learning-assisted discovery of growth decision elements by relating bacterial population dynamics to environmental diversity. Link

Read this article on the Asimov Press website.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a wig-wearing, 17th-century cloth merchant in Delft, was the first person to see a microbe. 

The Dutchman crafted lenses using soda lime glass, which he then peered through to assess the quality of his cloth. But eventually, driven by curiosity, van Leeuwenhoek applied his lenses to a more eclectic assortment of specimens, such as mold, bees, and lice. In 1675, he “discovered living creatures in Rain water which had stood but few days in a new earthen pot” in the corner of his room. Van Leeuwenhoek’s observations of single-celled organisms — or “animalcules,” as he called them1 — were sent by letter to the Royal Society and published in 1677.

For the next 250 years, biology remained an object of study. Microscopists crafted ever-more-powerful lenses, intrepid naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt trekked into jungles and sent thousands of exotic specimens back to Europe2, and taxonomists tried to piece everything together. Biology was a field of both collection and description. Natural History museums sprung up to display biological oddities; nearly 800 of them in the United States alone. 

But then, in the 1930s, physicists and chemists launched a mission to understand life based on the molecules within cells. Molecular biology, as the field came to be called3, pushed biology from an object of study, driven forward by gentleman scientists and precocious country clergymen, into a tool with which to solve urgent problems.

Recombinant DNA technologies were invented in the 1970s. Gene-editing methods, polymerase chain reaction, and the first human drug made from engineered microbes all debuted in the 1980s. A human chromosome was sequenced in the 1990s, a few years after Dolly the Sheep was cloned. A first draft of the human genome was completed in 2003. CRISPR gene-editing was invented in 2012 and applied to human embryos soon after. At least six CAR-T cancer therapies have now garnered F.D.A. approval, and chick-culling technologies could save millions of male chicks from shredders each year. The bioeconomy today accounts for 5 percent of U.S. GDP, more than mining or construction.

With most of these advancements taking place in the last 50 years, we expect even more to happen in the next 50. There is an urgent need to understand and safely guide biological progress into the future.

Today we’re launching Asimov Press, a new publishing venture modeled on Stripe Press, that will produce a newsletter, magazine, and books that feature writing about biology. Our primary focus will be on biotechnology, but we will also publish pieces on metascience and adjacent themes. Newsletters and magazines will be free to read. Our mission is to spread ideas that elucidate the promise of biology, take its concomitant risks seriously, and direct talent toward solving pressing problems.

Our published work has three features that are worth discussing: Pieces will steel-man alternative approaches, focus on high-impact but often underrated facets of biotechnology, and strive for mechanistic and probabilistic reasoning.

Steelman: Biotechnology is not a panacea. Simple solutions are often the best solutions; no engineering required. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors at an Austrian Hospital wash their hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies, the maternal mortality rate fell from around 25 percent to 1 percent. In another example, a public health campaign to iodize salt in Switzerland helped bring down the rate of deaf-mute births fivefold in just 8 years. Rather than demand answers from biotechnology, we can often make a positive difference in the world by investing in better public health, improving infrastructure and education, or by scaling up existing inventions that have already proven effective.

Even so, simplicity can feel unsatisfactory or even provocative. Semmelweis, considered arrogant by senior doctors, was ostracized and eventually dismissed from his post. An early pioneer in germ theory, he died in a Viennese insane asylum, after being severely beaten by guards. In Switzerland, although evidence for the efficacy of iodized salt was robust, some eminent scientists spoke out against the interventions—advocating for elaborate alternative treatments. We’ll do our best to avoid publishing work that we wish were true, and instead aim to provide balanced, honest, and rigorous coverage of biotechnology.

High-impact solutions: Progress often makes its greatest strides in areas that are not widely covered by the media. We will de-emphasize medical topics and focus instead on areas such as animal welfare and climate resiliency, where biotechnology has proven astonishingly effective yet remains underexplored. We want people to focus on what is most urgent and tractable, and not necessarily on what is most glamorous. 

Laundry is one example. Engineered enzymes that remove stains in cold water reduced the energy required to do laundry by about 90 percent. Laundry may not be as immediately headline-grabbing as new cancer therapies, but it provides a concrete and ingenious solution to a demonstrable need. 

Mechanisms: Biotechnology shouldn’t be a mystery. Although its mechanisms are often infinitesimal, biology is material rather than magic. Cells are made from collections of atoms that we can manipulate, visualize, and control. Every engineering application has a mechanistic and tangible explanation. Often, these explanations are astonishingly beautiful. We encourage our writers to delve deeper and elucidate complex concepts in clear, illustrative prose.

***

Asimov Press will publish one feature article every two weeks, with additional newsletters and shorter essays scattered in between. Articles will be bundled into a magazine every three months, and each magazine will have a themed section with additional pieces that have not been published before.

Learn more about our article types and how to write for us by perusing the Pitch Guide. Deep Dives explain how hard-won progress can be, and in so doing, help us better appreciate how far humanity has come. We’re particularly fond of Why We Didn’t Get a Malaria Vaccine Sooner. Essays explain surprising viewpoints or make compelling arguments about biotechnology; examples include I Should Have Loved Biology, Pandemic Prevention as Fire-fighting, and Is cultivated meat for real?  We’re also commissioning speculative fiction that imagines positive, but plausible, biological futures, in addition to photo essays that visually demystify places involved in biotechnology. Book projects will launch in 2024.

Asimov Press is an editorially-independent initiative funded by Asimov but does not publish pieces about the company or its commercial interests. Our team consists of two founding editors: Niko McCarty and Xander Balwit. We’re grateful to have excellent advisors aiding us on this journey, including Saloni Dattani (Our World in Data, Works in Progress), Tessa Alexanian (Biosecurity Fellow at The Council on Strategic Risks), Tom Ellis (Imperial College London), and Tony Kulesa (Pillar VC). Learn more at press.asimov.com.