Announcing Our First Book: Origins

A collection of essays on scientific progress.

Our first book, Origins, is now available for purchase. It’s an anthology featuring eight essays, two interviews, and one work of fiction.

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.