Read Something Wonderful (about Biology) — Asimov Press

year

Title

Author

Category

2021

Lena

qntm

Sci-Fi

2018

Innovation by Evolution: Bringing New Chemistry to Life

Frances Arnold

Nobel Lecture

2012

Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency

Jack W. Scannell

Health

2022

When do ideas get easier to find?

Eric Gilliam

Metascience

2018

Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck

Patrick Collison & Michael Nielsen

Metascience

2021

Time to Assume that Health Research is Fraudulent Until Proved Otherwise?

Richard Smith

Metascience

2025

The Problem with Early Cancer Detection

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Health

2016

Embryo Selection for Intelligence

Gwern

Health

2024

Why Haven't Biologists Cured Cancer?

Ruxandra Tesloianu

Health

2023

Some thoughts on causality in biological systems

José Luis Ricón

Biology

2021

A breakthrough from 60 years ago: “General nature of the genetic code for proteins” (1961)

Matthew Cobb

History

2005

Helicobacter — The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discoveryr

J. Robin Warren

Nobel Lecture

2007

Simplicity in Biology

Uri Alon

Biology

2021

The Future of Biotech is Founder-Led

Tony Kulesa

Industry

2019

Young CEOs Have Built Many of the Largest Biotech Companies

Richard Murphey

Industry

2023

What Watson and Crick Really Took from Franklin

Matthew Cobb & Nathaniel Comfort

History

2024

Francis Crick Was Misunderstood

Matthew Cobb

History

2024

Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?

Lada Nuzhna

Health

2023

Winner Take All Science

Dynomight

Metascience

2011

A history of optogenetics: the development of tools for controlling brain circuits with light

Ed Boyden

History

2020

I Should Have Loved Biology

James Somers

Personal

2021

Cells Are Very Fast and Crowded Places

Ken Shirriff

Cells

1976

Life at Low Reynolds Number

E.M. Purcell

Cells

2024

The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell

James Somers & Edwin Morris

Cells

1960

Thoughts About Biology

James Bonner

Personal

2013

Biology is More Theoretical Than Physics

Jeremy Gunawardena

Theory

2002

Can A Biologist Fix A Radio?

Yuri Lazebnik

Theory

2014

The Perfect Human is Puerto Rican

Lior Pachter

Personal

2000

Molecular "Vitalism"

Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart & Tim Mitchison

Theory

2023

How Life Really Works

Philip Ball

Biology

2020

AlphaFold2 @ CASP14: “It feels like one’s child has left home”

Mohammed AlQuraishi

AI

2015

Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?

Rob Phillips

Theory

1926

On Being the Right Size

J.B.S. Haldane

Biology

2019

Slaying the Speckled Monster

Jason Crawford

History

2023

Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner

Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster & Siddhartha Haria

Health

2023

Biology is a Burrito

Niko McCarty

Cells

2018

Jonas Salk, the People’s Scientist

Algis Valiunas

History

2016

The People Who Saw Evolution

Joel Achenbach

History

2019

Is the Cell Really a Machine?

Daniel J. Nicholson

Theory

2022

Research Papers Used to Have Style. What Happened?

Roger's Bacon

History

2022

The NIH Report

Matt Faherty

Metascience

2019

Night Science

Itai Yanai & Martin Lercher

Personal

2022

Atoms are Local

Elliot Hershberg

Biology

2025

AI Isn’t Replacing Radiologists

Deena Mousa

AI

2010

Sequences and Consequences

Sydney Brenner

Theory

1988

Sequences, Sequences, and Sequences

Frederick Sanger

Personal

2009

How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem

Uri Alon

Metascience

2024

Problem Choice and Decision Trees in Science and Engineering

Michael Fischbach

Metascience

1996

Interview with Leonard Adleman

Diane Krieger

Personal

2021

Market Failures in Science

Milan Cvitkovic

Industry

2022

Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing

Milan Cvitkovic

Industry

2020

(How) Should We Pursue Human Longevity?

Milan Cvitkovic

Health

2015

Life Extension Cost-Benefits

Gwern

Health

2020

The Longevity FAQ

José Luis Ricón

Health

2020

Peer Rejection in Science

José Luis Ricón

Metascience

2021

How Science Beat the Virus

Ed Yong

Health

2025

Cancer Has a Surprising Amount of Detail

Abishaike Mahajan

Health

2022

They May As Well Grow on Trees

Xander Balwit

Sci-Fi

2024

Models of Life

Abhishaike Mahajan

Sci-Fi

2023

A Protein Printer

Niko McCarty & Julian Englert

Sci-Fi

2015

A Brief History of CHO Cells

LSF Magazine

History

2024

The Impersonator: The Fake Data Were Coming From Inside the Lab

Uri Simonsohn

Metascience

2024

Immune-Computer Interfaces

Hannu Rajaniemi

Sci-Fi

2024

We’re Not Going to Run Out of New Anatomy Anytime Soon

Mike Taylor, Matt Wedel & Darren Naish

Biology

2012

No Evidence of Disease

Maciej Ceglowski

Personal

2024

Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?

Scott Alexander

Health

2024

Some Questions About Biotech That I Find Interesting

Alex Telford

Industry

2024

The Mouse as a Microscope

Alex Telford

History

2024

The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia

Lee Alan Dugatkin

History

2021

Immortal Yeast: A Week’s Worth of Research

Laura Deming

Personal

2023

Everything Wrong with Mouse Studies (Kinda)

Niko McCarty

Biology

2023

First Clean Water, Now Clean Air

Fin Moorhouse

Health

2023

Where Do People Come From?

Fin Moorhouse

Biology

1993

The Coming Technological Singularity

Vernor Vinge

Sci-Fi

2025

Century-Scale Storage

Maxwell Neely-Cohen

Biology

2025

Why Can’t Biology Move Faster?

Heidi Huang

Metascience

2021

Wake up and smell the extinct leucadendrons

Lisa Melton

Biology

2021

Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs

Slime Mold Time Mold

History

2021

A Chemical Hunger — Part I: Mysteries

Slime Mold Time Mold

Health

2022

Picogram-Scale Interstellar Probes via Bioinspired Engineering

George Church

Biology

2018

Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation

Brian Hanley, William Bains & George Church

Health

2025

Mechanisms Too Simple for Humans to Design

Malmesbury

Biology

2021

Bottleneck Analysis: Positional Chemistry

Adam Marblestone

Theory

2019

The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades

Sharon Begley

Metascience

2024

Tinker

Richard Ngo

Sci-Fi

2024

Riffing on Machines of Loving Grace

Stephen Malina

AI

2024

A Case Against the Placebo Effect

A Literal Banana

Theory

2019

The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life is Rare

Andrew Snyder-Beattie & colleagues

Theory

2024

Can AI Solve Science?

Stephen Wolfram

AI

1984

The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse

S. Michael Halloran

History

1974

The Lives of a Cell

Lewis Thomas

Cells

2008

Engineering Biology

Drew Endy

Biology

1980

Reflections on the Historiography of Molecular Biology

Horace Freeland Judson

History

2024

Predictive Biology

Jacob Kimmel

AI

2023

The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today

Alex Telford

History

2014

Coming full circle-from endless complexity to simplicity and back again

Robert Weinberg

Theory

2023

Do We Still Need Journals?

Corin Wagen

Metascience

2025

Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough

Seemay Chou

Metascience

2017

Patents Are Destroying the Soul of Academic Science

Michael Eisen

Metascience

2013

A Question of Taste

Tim Mitchison

Personal

1973

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Biology

2019

How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation

Alexey Guzey

Metascience

2022

A Future History of Biomedical Progress

Adam Green

AI

2021

Sequencing a Human Genome at Home

Brian Naughton

Personal

2021

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective

Ingfei Chen

Metascience

2024

Mitochondria Are Alive

Liyam Chitayat

Theory

2025

The Nobel Duel

Metacelsus

History

2024

How GLP-1 Development Was Abandoned in 1990

Jeffrey S. Flier

Personal

2025

We Still Can’t Predict Much of Anything in Biology

Claus Wilke

AI

2025

All Atom Virtual Cell

Andrew White

Biology

2022

The Scientific Virtues

Slime Mold Time Mold

Metascience

2008

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Martin Schwartz

Personal

2004

Scents and Sensibility: A Molecular Logic of Olfactory Perception

Richard Axel

Nobel Lecture

2014

How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation: a conversation with Sydney Brenner

Elizabeth Dzeng

Metascience

2023

A National Evil

Jonah Goodman

Health

2025

Pity the Barefoot Pigeon

Ian Frazier

Biology

2023

America Is Telling Itself a Lie About Roadkill

Ben Goldfarb

Biology

2016

The Empty Brain

Robert Epstein

Biology

2022

Predictive validity in drug discovery: what it is, why it matters and how to improve it

Jack Scannell & Colleagues

Health

2023

Is Cultivated Meat For Real?

Robert Yaman

Industry

2024

Before They Hatch

Robert Yaman

Industry

2024

What Science Can Learn from Car Mechanics

Trevor Klee

Metascience

2024

10 technologies that won't exist in 5 years

Jacob Trefethen

Health

2025

Why science needs outsiders

Alvin Djajadikerta & Laura Lungu

Metascience

2025

Limit Thinking

David Jordan

Metascience

2017

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

Stephen Buranyi

Metascience

Created by Niko McCarty. 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. Inspired by https://readsomethingwonderful.com

Please send suggestions and broken links to niko@asimov.com.

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