Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until could return with a prototype? Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization? Or that an Italian physician spent 30 years weighing himself in a specially designed chair before and after eating, sleeping, and excreting to figure out exactly what accounted for the discrepancies he noticed?
These stories and more, from how a machine using salvaged meat-slicing blades chopped up 6,000 glowing jellyfish per day and led to the discovery of GFP to how grabbing the wrong bottle while studying rooster sperm lead to modern cryopreservation, appear in our third book, Making the Modern Laboratory, now available for pre-order. Over 504-pages, 36 authors explain the origins of our most dependable and insightful research tools, making it a fine gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist.
We announced this book one year ago, and getting it across the finish line has been a labor of love. We’re thrilled by the final result and hope you will be too.
This project couldn’t have happened without Ella Watkins-Dulaney’s initial vision and years-long determination to see it through. The book was typeset by Jake Brussel Faria, a designer in New York City, fact-checked by Samuel Clamons and Nicholas Porter, copyedited by Devon Balwit, and edited by Niko McCarty with contributions by Xander Balwit. Making the Modern Laboratory was printed at Grafiche Veneziane, an artisan press in Italy.
We also thank all the writers who contributed essays: Ulkar Aghayeva, Patrick Almhjell, Amelie Andreas, Xander Balwit, Saad Bhamla, Kevin Blake, Karol Buda, Alfred C. Chin, Evan DeTurk, Or Doni, Alex Federation, Alicia J. Kaestli, Sotirios Karathanasis, Andrew J. Konecny, David Lang, Matt Lubin, Niko McCarty, Roberta McLain, Owen Meadows, Lucas Mergan, Andreas Metousis, Luke Mitchelson, Corrado Nai, Mahlaqua Noor, Merrick Pierson Smela, Sachin Rawat, Logan E. Savidge, Smrithi Sunil, Matthew Bryce Taylor, Alex Telford, Nicolas Tilmans, Nehal Udyavar, Gerrit van Rensburg, Donna Vatnick, Ella Watkins-Dulaney, and Spencer Wright.
Pre-Order
Making the Modern Laboratory is priced at $49 and worth every penny. We’re offering free shipping in the United States. With a hard cloth cover, it is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. Each copy is shrink-wrapped for safe shipping, and deliveries are expected in November.
The book was set in typefaces designed by Charles Mazé for Abyme, by Seb McLauchlan for Dinamo, and by Eurostandard in collaboration with Maximage. Its three typefaces—Mercure, ABC ROM and OCR-X—represent threads of typographic history, with each roughly matching a period described in the text. This means the letters printed throughout the book are close cousins of the fonts that the scientists and inventors being described would have read and printed in as they worked.
We consider international shipping for bulk orders, and are offering paid subscribers to this newsletter 25% off their order. Please email editors@asimov.com for details.
Contents
The molecular biology laboratory is filled with things that most scientists take for granted. Few people know the history of the centrifuge, GFP, or the model organisms they regularly experiment on. We wrote this book to explore how these objects became staples in the lab, hoping that a closer look at the mundane might reveal something about scientific progress. And indeed, we found that even the simplest tools often hide stories of competition, persistence and chance.
The essays span five sections: Benchtop, Molecular Biology, Measurement & Analysis, Model Organisms and Computation & Automation. Each essay focuses on a single tool, technique or organism. You can read the book cover to cover, or open to an essay at random and quickly learn something unexpected.
The book also says something about the future. Even before we assembled these stories, we noticed that if you compared the molecular biology laboratory of today to those from the 1960s, they look basically the same. As we wrote in our original announcement:
… 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 fact, when we began the book, we planned to use stories of the past to predict what laboratories might look like in the future. But we quickly abandoned that goal because we realized that just about every technology used today arose from unforeseeable breakthroughs and persistent tinkering with methods and materials already in use.
First, we saw that technologies often advance in leaps. A field slowly climbs a curve of progress, until an unexpected scientific discovery opens an entirely new curve, steeper than the last, resetting what is considered feasible.
Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a classic example. Early versions required researchers to move samples between temperatures and replenish enzymes destroyed by the heating steps. The technique was tedious. Adapting Taq, a heat-stable enzyme from a bacterium first isolated in Yellowstone National Park, made PCR much easier to automate (202–206). CRISPR likewise emerged from basic research into bacterial immune systems and rapidly became a widely used gene-editing tool (452).
Second, we realized that one cannot predict what future laboratories will look like simply by choosing the technologies that seem optimal today.
As we mentioned earlier, Heinrich Schnitger built that prototype of the micropipette in 1957 largely because he was sick of mouth pipetting. But other pipette designs already existed at that time! The widespread adoption of his design depended on practical details as well as invention: while a thumb-operated plunger made it convenient, a deal with Eppendorf helped scale it (17–19). Many promising technologies never spread because they are difficult to use, lack funding or fail to reach people who can manufacture and promote them.
Once a tool becomes familiar, it quickly gains staying power. Conventional thermocyclers, for example, still heat and cool samples in metal blocks. Researchers have developed photonic alternatives that use light to heat samples and can offer faster cycling and lower energy use. Yet conventional machines remain in most laboratories. Scientists have good reasons to value familiar, reliable methods—established protocols, for example—so a faster instrument on its own may not be enough to force change.
Thus, while offering this book as a historical document, we think that these stories can help us better understand how to bring new tools into existence and hasten the long arc of progress.
The link only works to US, what's the path to order to Latam? I'm in Bogotá, Colombia.