Read Something Wonderful (about Biology)

A curated list of 100+ essays about biology and science.

One of my favorite websites is called Read Something Wonderful. It’s a curated list, compiled by the Matter team, of essays from scattered corners of the Internet on all kinds of topics, with no particular theme.

Some of the essays were written by entirely unknown authors, whereas others were written by esteemed figures such as Steve Jobs or Isaac Asimov. None of the essays are newsworthy or timely, but all contain some evergreen idea or insight unlikely to diminish in importance over time.

While curation is a contribution that we often regard as less important or impressive than original writing, it is highly valuable. For one, it can lead readers to something they never would have found on their own.

When I first found Read Something Wonderful, I spent weeks sifting through its essays and “discovered” perhaps a dozen writers that I quickly subscribed to (and still read today, more than a year later.) In my planner, I marked a note to read two per day; my small way to spread their wealth over a longer length of time. I feared that, if I read too many essays in one day, they’d jumble together in my brain, and I’d lose track of some of the ideas contained within. (Indeed, I was following advice from another essay, entitled “Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.”)

Today, we are releasing our own curated list of essays about biology and science. Like Read Something Wonderful, none of these essays are “timely.” They are not arranged in any particular order and so are meant for patient perusal. They span more than five decades of writing, but there is, admittedly, a recency bias. And all of them contain ideas that challenge or excite or, in some cases, provoke disagreement. We’ll add articles to this list, or remove them, if that changes.

If you find an essay on this list that you really enjoy, we hope you will dig around and find more articles from that writer. Some of them first appeared here in Asimov Press. And if you would like to suggest additional essays, please email niko@asimov.com. Happy reading!

The full, updated list is available at read.asimov.com. Click here to view.

Wonderful Essays

1. Lena, qntm, 2021

2. Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life, Frances H. Arnold, 2018

3. Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency, Jack W. Scannell et al., 2012

4. When do ideas get easier to find?, Eric Gilliam, 2022

5. Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen, 2018

6. Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proved otherwise?, Richard Smith, 2021

7. The Problem With Early Cancer Detection, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2025

8. Embryo Selection For Intelligence, Gwern, 2016

9. Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?, Ruxandra Tesloianu, 2024

10. Some thoughts on causality in biological systems, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2023

11. A breakthrough from 60 years ago: “General nature of the genetic code for proteins” (1961), Matthew Cobb, 2021

12. Helicobacter — The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discovery, J. Robin Warren, 2005

13. Simplicity in biology, Uri Alon, 2007

14. The future of biotech is founder-led, Tony Kulesa, 2021

15. Young CEOs have built many of the largest biotech companies, Richard Murphey, 2019

16. What Watson and Crick really took from Franklin, Matthew Cobb & Nathaniel Comfort, 2023

17. Francis Crick Was Misunderstood, Matthew Cobb, 2024

18. Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?, Lada Nuzhna, 2024

19. Winner Take All Science, Dynomight, 2023

20. A history of optogenetics: the development of tools for controlling brain circuits with light, Ed Boyden, 2011

21. I should have loved biology, James Somers, 2020

22. Cells are very fast and crowded places, Ken Shirriff, 2011

23. Life at Low Reynolds Number, E.M. Purcell, 1976

24. The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell, James Somers & Edwin Morris, 2024

25. Thoughts About Biology, James Bonner, 1960

26. Biology is more theoretical than physics, Jeremy Gunawardena, 2013

27. Can a biologist fix a radio?, Yuri Lazebnik, 2002

28. The Perfect Human is Puerto Rican, Lior Pachter, 2014

29. Molecular “Vitalism”, Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, Tim Mitchison, 2000

30. How Life Really Works, Philip Ball, 2023

31. AlphaFold2 @ CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home”, Mohammed AlQuraishi, 2020

32. Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?, Rob Phillips, 2015

33. On Being the Right Size, J.B.S. Haldane, 1926

34. Slaying the Speckled Monster, Jason Crawford, 2019

35. Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner, Saloni Dattani & Rachel Glennerster & Siddhartha Haria, 2023

36. Biology is a Burrito, Niko McCarty, 2023

37. Jonas Salk, the People’s Scientist, Algis Valiunas, 2018

38. The People Who Saw Evolution, Joel Achenbach, 2016

39. Is the cell really a machine?, Daniel J. Nicholson, 2019

40. Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened?, Roger’s Bacon, 2022

41. The NIH Report, Matt Faherty, 2022

42. Night Science, Itai Yanai & Martin Lercher, 2019

43. Atoms Are Local, Elliot Hershberg, 2022

44. AI Isn’t Replacing Radiologists, Deena Mousa, 2025

45. Sequences and Consequences, Sydney Brenner, 2010

46. Sequences, Sequences, and Sequences, Frederick Sanger, 1988

47. How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem, Uri Alon, 2009

48. Problem Choice and Decision Trees in Science and Engineering, Michael Fischbach, 2024

49. Interview with Leonard Adleman, Diane Krieger, 1996

50. Market Failures in Science, Milan Cvitkovic, 2021

51. Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing, Milan Cvitkovic, 2022

52. (How) should we pursue human longevity?, Milan Cvitkovic, 2020

53. Life Extension Cost-Benefits, Gwern, 2015

54. The Longevity FAQ, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2020

55. Peer Rejection in Science, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2020

56. How Science Beat the Virus, Ed Yong, 2021

57. Cancer Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, Abhishaike Mahajan, 2025

58. They May As Well Grow on Trees, Xander Balwit, 2022

59. Models of Life, Abhishaike Mahajan, 2024

60. A Protein Printer, Niko McCarty & Julian Englert, 2023

61. A Brief History of CHO Cells, LSF Magazine, 2015

62. The Impersonator: The Fake Data Were Coming From Inside the Lab, Uri Simonsohn, 2024

63. Immune-Computer Interfaces, Hannu Rajaniemi, 2024

64. We’re Not Going to Run Out of New Anatomy Anytime Soon, Mike Taylor & Matt Wedel & Darren Naish, 2024

65. No Evidence of Disease, Maciej Ceglowski, 2012

66. Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?, Scott Alexander, 2024

67. Some Questions About Biotech That I Find Interesting, Alex Telford, 2024

68. The Mouse as a Microscope, Alex Telford, 2024

69. The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia, Lee Alan Dugatkin, 2024

70. Immortal Yeast: A Week’s Worth of Research, Laura Deming, 2021

71. First Clean Water, Now Clean Air, Fin Moorhouse, 2023

72. Where Do People Come From?, Fin Moorhouse, 2023

73. The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge, 1993

74. Century-Scale Storage, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, 2025

75. Why Can’t Biology Move Faster?, Heidi Huang, 2025

76. Wake up and smell the extinct leucadendrons, Lisa Melton, 2021

77. Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2021

78. A Chemical Hunger — Part I: Mysteries, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2021

79. Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering, George Church, 2022

80. Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation, Brian Hanley & William Bains & George Church, 2018

81. Mechanisms Too Simple for Humans to Design, Malmesbury, 2025

82. Bottleneck Analysis: Positional Chemistry, Adam Marblestone, 2021

83. The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades, Sharon Begley, 2019

84. Tinker, Richard Ngo, 2024

85. Riffing on Machines of Loving Grace, Stephen Malina, 2024

86. A Case Against the Placebo Effect, A Literal Banana, 2024

87. The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare, Andrew Snyder-Beattie et al., 2019

88. Can AI Solve Science?, Stephen Wolfram, 2024

89. The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse, S. Michael Halloran, 1984

90. The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, 1974

91. Engineering Biology, Drew Endy, 2008

92. Reflections on the Historiography of Molecular Biology, Horace Freeland Judson, 1980

93. Predictive Biology, Jacob Kimmel, 2024

94. The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today, Alex Telford, 2023

95. Coming full circle-from endless complexity to simplicity and back again, Robert Weinberg, 2014

96. Do We Still Need Journals?, Corin Wagen, 2023

97. Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough, Seemay Chou, 2025

98. Patents Are Destroying the Soul of Academic Science, Michael Eisen, 2017

99. A Question of Taste, Tim Mitchison, 2013

100. Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973

101. How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation, Alexey Guzey, 2019

102. A Future History of Biomedical Progress, Adam Green, 2022

103. Sequencing a Human Genome at Home, Brian Naughton, 2021

104. How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective, Ingfei Chen, 2021

105. Mitochondria Are Alive, Liyam Chitayat, 2024

106. The Nobel Duel, Metacelsus, 2025

107. How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990, Jeffrey S. Flier, 2024

108. We Still Can’t Predict Much of Anything in Biology, Claus Wilke, 2025

109. All Atom Virtual Cell, Andrew White, 2025

110. The Scientific Virtues, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2022

111. The importance of stupidity in scientific research, Martin Schwartz, 2008

112. Scents and Sensibility: A Molecular Logic of Olfactory Perception, Richard Axel, 2004

113. How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation: a conversation with Sydney Brenner, Elizabeth Dzeng, 2014

114. A National Evil, Jonah Goodman, 2023

115. Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?, Stephen Buranyi, 2017

116. Pity the Barefoot Pigeon, Ian Frazier, 2025

117. America Is Telling Itself a Lie About Roadkill, Ben Goldfarb, 2023

118. The Empty Brain, Robert Epstein, 2016

119. Predictive validity in drug discovery: what it is, why it matters and how to improve it, Jack Scannell et al., 2022

120. Is Cultivated Meat For Real?, Robert Yaman, 2023

121. Before They Hatch, Robert Yaman, 2024

122. What Science Can Learn from Car Mechanics, Trevor Klee, 2024

123. 10 Technologies That Won’t Exist in 5 Years, Jacob Trefethen, 2024

124. Why Science Needs Outsiders, Alvin Djajadikerta & Laura Lungu, 2025

125. Limit Thinking, David Jordan, 2025

Thanks to Joanne Peng, Willy Chertman, Alec Nielsen, Eryney Marrogi, Milan Cvitkovic, Xander Balwit, Shelby Newsad, Jacob Trefethen, Merrick Pierson Smela, Tony Kulesa and others for recommendations.

Cite: McCarty, N. “Read Something Wonderful (about Biology).” Asimov Press (2025). https://doi.org/10.62211/29jr-82kw