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
Lena, qntm, 2021
Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life, Frances H. Arnold, 2018
Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency, Jack W. Scannell et al., 2012
When do ideas get easier to find?, Eric Gilliam, 2022
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen, 2018
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proved otherwise?, Richard Smith, 2021
The Problem With Early Cancer Detection, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2025
Embryo Selection For Intelligence, Gwern, 2016
Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?, Ruxandra Tesloianu, 2024
Some thoughts on causality in biological systems, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2023
A breakthrough from 60 years ago: “General nature of the genetic code for proteins” (1961), Matthew Cobb, 2021
Helicobacter — The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discovery, J. Robin Warren, 2005
Simplicity in biology, Uri Alon, 2007
The future of biotech is founder-led, Tony Kulesa, 2021
Young CEOs have built many of the largest biotech companies, Richard Murphey, 2019
What Watson and Crick really took from Franklin, Matthew Cobb & Nathaniel Comfort, 2023
Francis Crick Was Misunderstood, Matthew Cobb, 2024
Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?, Lada Nuzhna, 2024
Winner Take All Science, Dynomight, 2023
A history of optogenetics: the development of tools for controlling brain circuits with light, Ed Boyden, 2011
I should have loved biology, James Somers, 2020
Cells are very fast and crowded places, Ken Shirriff, 2011
Life at Low Reynolds Number, E.M. Purcell, 1976
The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell, James Somers & Edwin Morris, 2024
Thoughts About Biology, James Bonner, 1960
Biology is more theoretical than physics, Jeremy Gunawardena, 2013
Can a biologist fix a radio?, Yuri Lazebnik, 2002
The Perfect Human is Puerto Rican, Lior Pachter, 2014
Molecular “Vitalism”, Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, Tim Mitchison, 2000
How Life Really Works, Philip Ball, 2023
AlphaFold2 @ CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home”, Mohammed AlQuraishi, 2020
Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?, Rob Phillips, 2015
On Being the Right Size, J.B.S. Haldane, 1926
Slaying the Speckled Monster, Jason Crawford, 2019
Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner, Saloni Dattani & Rachel Glennerster & Siddhartha Haria, 2023
Biology is a Burrito, Niko McCarty, 2023
Jonas Salk, the People’s Scientist, Algis Valiunas, 2018
The People Who Saw Evolution, Joel Achenbach, 2016
Is the cell really a machine?, Daniel J. Nicholson, 2019
Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened?, Roger’s Bacon, 2022
The NIH Report, Matt Faherty, 2022
Night Science, Itai Yanai & Martin Lercher, 2019
Atoms Are Local, Elliot Hershberg, 2022
AI Isn’t Replacing Radiologists, Deena Mousa, 2025
Sequences and Consequences, Sydney Brenner, 2010
Sequences, Sequences, and Sequences, Frederick Sanger, 1988
How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem, Uri Alon, 2009
Problem Choice and Decision Trees in Science and Engineering, Michael Fischbach, 2024
Interview with Leonard Adleman, Diane Krieger, 1996
Market Failures in Science, Milan Cvitkovic, 2021
Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing, Milan Cvitkovic, 2022
(How) should we pursue human longevity?, Milan Cvitkovic, 2020
Life Extension Cost-Benefits, Gwern, 2015
The Longevity FAQ, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2020
Peer Rejection in Science, José Luis Ricón (Nintil), 2020
How Science Beat the Virus, Ed Yong, 2021
Cancer Has a Surprising Amount of Detail, Abhishaike Mahajan, 2025
They May As Well Grow on Trees, Xander Balwit, 2022
Models of Life, Abhishaike Mahajan, 2024
A Protein Printer, Niko McCarty & Julian Englert, 2023
A Brief History of CHO Cells, LSF Magazine, 2015
The Impersonator: The Fake Data Were Coming From Inside the Lab, Uri Simonsohn, 2024
Immune-Computer Interfaces, Hannu Rajaniemi, 2024
We’re Not Going to Run Out of New Anatomy Anytime Soon, Mike Taylor & Matt Wedel & Darren Naish, 2024
No Evidence of Disease, Maciej Ceglowski, 2012
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?, Scott Alexander, 2024
Some Questions About Biotech That I Find Interesting, Alex Telford, 2024
The Mouse as a Microscope, Alex Telford, 2024
The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia, Lee Alan Dugatkin, 2024
Immortal Yeast: A Week’s Worth of Research, Laura Deming, 2021
First Clean Water, Now Clean Air, Fin Moorhouse, 2023
Where Do People Come From?, Fin Moorhouse, 2023
The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge, 1993
Century-Scale Storage, Maxwell Neely-Cohen, 2025
Why Can’t Biology Move Faster?, Heidi Huang, 2025
Wake up and smell the extinct leucadendrons, Lisa Melton, 2021
Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2021
A Chemical Hunger — Part I: Mysteries, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2021
Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering, George Church, 2022
Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation, Brian Hanley & William Bains & George Church, 2018
Mechanisms Too Simple for Humans to Design, Malmesbury, 2025
Bottleneck Analysis: Positional Chemistry, Adam Marblestone, 2021
The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades, Sharon Begley, 2019
Tinker, Richard Ngo, 2024
Riffing on Machines of Loving Grace, Stephen Malina, 2024
A Case Against the Placebo Effect, A Literal Banana, 2024
The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare, Andrew Snyder-Beattie et al., 2019
Can AI Solve Science?, Stephen Wolfram, 2024
The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse, S. Michael Halloran, 1984
The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, 1974
Engineering Biology, Drew Endy, 2008
Reflections on the Historiography of Molecular Biology, Horace Freeland Judson, 1980
Predictive Biology, Jacob Kimmel, 2024
The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today, Alex Telford, 2023
Coming full circle-from endless complexity to simplicity and back again, Robert Weinberg, 2014
Do We Still Need Journals?, Corin Wagen, 2023
Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough, Seemay Chou, 2025
Patents Are Destroying the Soul of Academic Science, Michael Eisen, 2017
A Question of Taste, Tim Mitchison, 2013
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1973
How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation, Alexey Guzey, 2019
A Future History of Biomedical Progress, Adam Green, 2022
Sequencing a Human Genome at Home, Brian Naughton, 2021
How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective, Ingfei Chen, 2021
Mitochondria Are Alive, Liyam Chitayat, 2024
The Nobel Duel, Metacelsus, 2025
How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990, Jeffrey S. Flier, 2024
We Still Can’t Predict Much of Anything in Biology, Claus Wilke, 2025
All Atom Virtual Cell, Andrew White, 2025
The Scientific Virtues, Slime Mold Time Mold, 2022
The importance of stupidity in scientific research, Martin Schwartz, 2008
Scents and Sensibility: A Molecular Logic of Olfactory Perception, Richard Axel, 2004
How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation: a conversation with Sydney Brenner, Elizabeth Dzeng, 2014
A National Evil, Jonah Goodman, 2023
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?, Stephen Buranyi, 2017
Pity the Barefoot Pigeon, Ian Frazier, 2025
America Is Telling Itself a Lie About Roadkill, Ben Goldfarb, 2023
The Empty Brain, Robert Epstein, 2016
Predictive validity in drug discovery: what it is, why it matters and how to improve it, Jack Scannell et al., 2022
Is Cultivated Meat For Real?, Robert Yaman, 2023
Before They Hatch, Robert Yaman, 2024
What Science Can Learn from Car Mechanics, Trevor Klee, 2024
10 Technologies That Won’t Exist in 5 Years, Jacob Trefethen, 2024
Why Science Needs Outsiders, Alvin Djajadikerta & Laura Lungu, 2025
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
 | A guest post by
|
Holy cow, this is an amazing list! 🙌🤩
Love this!