In the early 1800s, only about 100 scientific journals existed worldwide. Just 100 years later, this number had risen to about 10,000, almost all of which were deeply unprofitable.

Most of these scientific publications clung to a tenuous existence, with prominent titles like The Reader (founded 1863) and Scientific Opinion (1864) struggling financially before ultimately folding. Even established and reputable periodicals, such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which had enjoyed royal patronage since it was formally taken over by the Royal Society in 1752, rarely made money and struggled to publish without assistance.

It is incredible, then, that Nature managed to survive. When the journal was launched by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan on November 4th, 1869, it did so amidst a graveyard of failed scientific periodicals. In fact, Nature did not turn a profit for the next THIRTY YEARS!

The fact that Nature is a "prestige" journal today, then, is basically a fluke of history. It only survived because it was bankrolled by the wealthy Alexander Macmillan, who, alongside his brother, had built Macmillan & Co. into one of Britain’s most successful publishers. Flush from a remarkably profitable decade built on fiction, theological texts, and educational works, Macmillan was eager to expand his empire and could afford to absorb the financial losses that would have buried other periodicals.

It seems like much the same is true of many magazines today. Many experiments in scientific publishing and journalism (**ahem**) only survive because they receive long-term, stable funding from wealthy individuals.

Read our history of Nature: press.asimov.com/articles/nature

In the early 1800s, only about 100 scientific journals existed worldwide. Just 100 years later, this number had risen to about 10,000, almost all of which were deeply unprofitable.

Most of these scientific publications clung to a tenuous existence, with prominent titles like The Reader (founded 1863) and Scientific Opinion (1864) struggling financially before ultimately folding. Even established and reputable periodicals, such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which had enjoyed royal patronage since it was formally taken over by the Royal Society in 1752, rarely made money and struggled to publish without assistance.

It is incredible, then, that Nature managed to survive. When the journal was launched by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan on November 4th, 1869, it did so amidst a graveyard of failed scientific periodicals. In fact, Nature did not turn a profit for the next THIRTY YEARS!

The fact that Nature is a "prestige" journal today, then, is basically a fluke of history. It only survived because it was bankrolled by the wealthy Alexander Macmillan, who, alongside his brother, had built Macmillan & Co. into one of Britain’s most successful publishers. Flush from a remarkably profitable decade built on fiction, theological texts, and educational works, Macmillan was eager to expand his empire and could afford to absorb the financial losses that would have buried other periodicals.

It seems like much the same is true of many magazines today. Many experiments in scientific publishing and journalism (**ahem**) only survive because they receive long-term, stable funding from wealthy individuals.

Read our history of Nature: press.asimov.com/articles/nature

The micropipette was developed in just two days. The vortex mixer was prototyped over three days.

Our modern micropipette design stems from Heinrich Schnitger, a 32-year-old German postdoc who threw a tantrum while mouth pipetting, vanished from the laboratory, and returned ool to pipette microlitre volumes.” Schnitger's patent was granted in 1961, and his design had “all the essential features of the modern pipette,” according to a close witness of the invention, including a spring-loaded piston, second spring to shoot out residual liquid, and plastic tip.

The vortex mixer, invented by the brothers Jack and Harold Kraft, was "sketched out...on October 20, 1958. Just three days later, they had built their first prototype using the same kind of shaded pole AC motor found in ...record players."

These stories and dozens more can be found in our newest book, Making the Modern Laboratory: press.asimov.com/articles/moder…

New episode on universal flu vaccines (and antivenoms) with @CurlyJungleJake, CEO of @centivax. They're trying to create a vaccine that protects against all strains of influenza: past, present, and future.

This is obviously a difficult thing to do. Seasonal flu vaccines are inst a virus that constantly mutates and recombines in animals. The efficacy of seasonal vaccines is also quite low; ranging from about 15 to 60 percent.

Instead of making vaccines that protect against only a few circulating strains of the virus, Centivax is trying to teach the immune system to recognize parts of the virus that many strains share and that resist mutation. The hope is that antibodies targeting these regions could protect even against strains we haven’t encountered yet, without scientists having to reformulate the vaccine every year.

Things seem to be going well: the company has tested the vaccine in about 180 people so far and will soon begin a Phase 2 trial.

This is probably the most ambitious technical interview I’ve ever done. We cover some extremely deep immunology, but Jake explained the ideas really clearly, and I left feeling like I finally understood how vaccines work and how scientists make them. I also came away much more convinced that a universal flu vaccine could work.

00:49 — Why flu vaccines need constant updating
03:07 — How influenza infects a cell
06:39 — Why our bodies don’t always make broadly-neutralizing antibodies
16:07 — Mutations and animals
23:42 — What is vaccine efficacy?
28:55 — Designing a universal flu vaccine
37:40 — The idea behind Centivax
44:16 — Clinical trials
57:33 — The business case for eradication
1:03:26 — How to eradicate the flu
1:07:26 — Could we make broad vaccines for the common cold?
1:09:07 — Building a universal snake antivenom
1:23:09 — Antivenom cocktails

The micropipette was developed in just two days. The vortex mixer was prototyped over three days.

Our modern micropipette design stems from Heinrich Schnitger, a 32-year-old German postdoc who threw a tantrum while mouth pipetting, vanished from the laboratory, and returned ool to pipette microlitre volumes.” Schnitger's patent was granted in 1961, and his design had “all the essential features of the modern pipette,” according to a close witness of the invention, including a spring-loaded piston, second spring to shoot out residual liquid, and plastic tip.

The vortex mixer, invented by the brothers Jack and Harold Kraft, was "sketched out...on October 20, 1958. Just three days later, they had built their first prototype using the same kind of shaded pole AC motor found in ...record players."

These stories and dozens more can be found in our newest book, Making the Modern Laboratory: press.asimov.com/articles/moder…

If you love biology, subscribe to Asimov Press. It's entirely free: press.asimov.com

How To: Genetically Modify a Flower 🧬🌹

We're working on an interactive book about cells, and how they work.

Our next installment, "A Recipe for Cells," is out today. It's about what cells are made from and why, despite us *knowing* what they are made from, we are not able to create life synthetically.

Read: press.asimov.com/books/burrito/…

If you love biology, subscribe to Asimov Press. It's entirely free: press.asimov.com

I'm writing an interactive book about cells, and how they work.

The latest installment, out today, is about why we are unable to create life from scratch despite knowing exactly what cells are made from.

In one part of the essay, I write about a thought experiment in which DNA of one meter. In that scenario, DNA polymerase (the enzyme responsible for copying DNA) would be the size of a FedEx truck. Replicating the E. coli genome to prepare for cell division would require two of these trucks, each moving in opposite directions at speeds of 375 miles per hour. Over the span of 40 minutes, these trucks would deliver five million packages and make just one error every 106 miles.

At the same time the FedEx truck is speeding by, thousands of ribosomes are busily making proteins, enzymes are converting millions of molecules each second, and the membrane is adding lipid molecules to expand, preparing to make a daughter cell. All of this movement offers thousands of opportunities for something to go wrong! At this scale, and these speeds, even rare errors can accumulate and kill the cell.

And yet life persists. A cell remakes itself even when things inevitably go wrong. If human builders are ever to rival the complexity and dynamism of a cell, then, we not only need to find the ingredients, but also arrange them in ways suited to extreme speeds and turbulent noise.

The full, interactive essay is at @AsimovPress: press.asimov.com/books/burrito/…

Big news! Our new book, "Making the Modern Laboratory," is now available for pre-order. It is a stunning, 504-page hardcover book that explains how the research laboratory, and everything in it, came to be.

Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German ith 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?

These stories and hundreds more are told in the book, which has a hard cloth cover and is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is also finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. It is priced at $49 and worth every penny.

Learn more and order: press.asimov.com/articles/moder…

If you love biology, subscribe to Asimov Press. It's entirely free: press.asimov.com

The "tree of life" is weirder and more tangled than you may believe -- and it's all because of bacteria and a mode of heredity called horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

In his 1995 book River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins uses the metaphor of a river of DNA to describe how genetic information flows through time. Speciation is like a fork in the river, after which genes that once freely intermingled rarely recombine. Dawkins calls this process “the long goodbye.” While that may be true for the genes of most multicellular eukaryotes, for microbial genes it is more like “see ya in a bit.”

That's because bacterial genes are not only transferred vertically (from parents to offspring) but horizontally between individual cells. These can be from different species, different genera, and much more distant lineages. Because of HGT, the branches of the tree of life do something branches aren't supposed to do: the criss-cross and merge.

For example, in E. coli, 755 genes (18% of its genome) has been horizontally transferred from other organisms. Cross-genus gene transfers have been identified in 1/3 of species. Bacterial genomes are not static, isolated entities; they're mosaics cobbled together from DNA gathered from across the tree of life.

Thanks to HGT, bacteria can acquire important new functions in one fell swoop. This is a major reason why antibiotic resistance has been able to spread globally in such a short time. It also has important implications for attempts to regulate genetic engineering based on taxonomic "boundaries."

You can read more in my latest for @AsimovPress 👉

New Essay in @AsimovPress about why trying to define a "species" can be so difficult; the whole notion of a species, at least for bacteria, is almost nonsensical.

Consider: For a 2015 paper, researchers took 2,000+ full E. coli genomes and compared them. Each genome contained , but only 3,000 of those genes were broadly shared across the strains.

The other 2,000 genes were unique and varied *a lot* from one cell to the next. Collectively, the 2,000+ E. coli genomes contained something like 89,000 distinct genes, all within this single species.

The boundaries between species, then, are basically man-made inventions. The reality is that the branches of the tree of life "criss-cross and merge."

Read: press.asimov.com/articles/speci…

In school, students are taught that species are well-defined things. But the truth is weirder; branches of the tree of life criss-cross and merge.

Even members of a single bacterial species have big genetic discrepancies from one cell to another.

New from @kevinsblake: press.asimov.com/articles/speci…

Mitochondria are alive.

They carry their own genomes and express their own genes within their lumens, an internal pocket of watery space, using biomolecules distinct from the cell’s nucleus. Mitochondria also replicate and divide through binary fission, much like bacteria. If one considers bacteria as living entities — and all biologists seem to — then it is impossible to explain why mitochondria are not.

From a thermodynamic perspective, mitochondria take in low-entropy inputs from their host cell, such as glucose or fatty acids, and expel high-entropy outputs, including carbon dioxide and water. Mitochondria also pump out protons through their inner membrane to maintain an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic balance, using the resulting gradient to produce the ATP molecules that fuel cellular functions, from DNA replication to protein synthesis.

From the molecular biologist’s perspective, a mitochondrion’s role is not limited to simple energy generation, either. Mitochondria also process information and interact with their environment, much like a human cell. They monitor steroid hormones, oxidative stress, heat, ATP levels, secondary metabolites, and many more molecules floating through their environment, the cell’s cytoplasm. Mitochondria then use this information to precisely control cellular functions. For example, when a virus invades a cell, the mitochondria are critical in sensing the intrusion and signaling a host cell to undergo programmed cell death to halt its spread.

And finally, mitochondria grow and reproduce in a manner distinct from the host’s replication process. Mitochondria independently copy their circular genomes, known as mitochondrial DNA, and divide through binary fission. Notably, mitochondrial replication has several distinct properties from those observed during human cellular replication. Mitochondrial DNA mutates 100-1,000 times faster than the human genome and these mutations can significantly alter a mitochondrion’s fitness, thereby changing the fitness of its host cell. Mitochondria are thus agents of — and subject to — the forces of evolution.

Despite all this evidence, the main case made against mitochondria being alive is that they do not perform all of these functions independently, as they must be embedded within the cytoplasm of a host cell to function. However, such an argument is logically inconsistent because, by this same logic, most organisms on Earth would not be considered “living.” After all, nothing in biology lives in isolation from its environment.

Read the full essay by Liyam Chitayat: asimov.press/p/mitochondria

If you love biology, subscribe to Asimov Press. It's entirely free: press.asimov.com

New Episode: How to Design Flowers

@NickDesnoyer uses genetic engineering, breeding, and pathogens to design and then create flowers that don't exist anywhere else on Earth. We talked about how he does it, in a room surrounded by many of his creations.

At the start of the is next project, called Paintunia, which is an engineered line of petunia that acts as a living canvas.

He has engineered these petunias to include an inducible gene; when he lightly touches their buds with a molecule called dexamethasone, the molecules seep into cells, switch on the gene, and cause them to make a pigment. The result is a paintable flower, where molecules literally control which colors show up in particular places. Nick’s plan is ultimately to engineer these petunias to express three separate colors, for cyan, magenta, and yellow.

Nick's ultimate dream is to build a botanical garden full of weird and wonderful flowers that exist nowhere else. We filmed this episode surrounded by flowers, and he patiently explained to me how each one gets its shape and pigmentation; how he combines breeding and genetic engineering to make new flowers; and how he searches scientific papers for mutations to figure out which plant crosses to make next.

I think he convinced me that designing new kinds of flowers makes us look more closely at nature, and appreciate it more deeply. After all, all the genes and variations he uses in the laboratory are based on designs that have evolved elsewhere. Hope you enjoy!

One place AI might be helpful, and where we’d like to see more ideas funded, is in using AI agents to simulate the structures of scientific institutions.

As Alvin Djajadikerta has written for this magazine:

We have never been able to run controlled experiments on scientific ossible to create labs that differ in only one respect and compare the results. But we could run AI agents in parallel populations under different research conditions, and analyze the results in detail. In this sense, AI scientists may give metascience its first model organism.

We can learn some things about ideal institutions from history, of course. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and the early Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge all produced extraordinary concentrations of paradigm-shifting work, mostly because they were small groups with enough institutional protection to pursue ideas that looked unproductive by conventional measures. But there are limited numbers of historical paradigm shifts to study, and we have barely begun to explore the design space!

What if, instead, one could use AI agents to systematically test how group structure shapes discovery: do small, isolated teams produce more conceptual reorganization than large, well-connected ones? Do flat hierarchies outperform rigid ones?

One could run AI agent populations that vary these factors independently and measure the results — something that is impractical to do with real institutions, where size, hierarchy, and communication patterns are all entangled.

Read more and subscribe: press.asimov.com/articles/ai-sc…

We're commissioning articles at @AsimovPress. Our inboxes are open to all ideas, but here are some pieces we're keen to publish:

1. Gene delivery to the brain
2. Why trees are hard to engineer
3. How to make a once-weekly insulin
4. Towards a 'universal' nanopore

& dozens more. PitcfVgn2P