Tomorrow we launch the sixth issue of Asimov Press, which is our largest yet. We don’t typically send out these Editors’ Notes, but this time we have two important announcements to share.

First, we’re pleased to announce our partnership with Astera Institute, a private foundation dedicated to creating public goods that accelerate scientific and technological progress. Astera will support our editorial work for the next two years, allowing us to collaborate with more writers, artists, designers, and data visualization specialists than ever before. This funding will not only sustain our coverage of biological innovation but also enable us to expand into long-form explorations of how science itself operates.

A central component of this partnership involves establishing a dedicated metascience column. In 2025, we plan to commission about ten articles examining how scientific inquiry functions. In previous issues, we've begun exploring narrow aspects of how science is done — Dan Elton's examination of peer review's shortcomings or Saloni Dattani’s look into how death records shape public health come to mind — but now we aim to go much deeper.

Starting this month, we will embed directly within scientific organizations, reporting firsthand on their methods, cultures, and results. We'll also investigate past and present metascience experiments, highlighting successes, failures, and ongoing innovations. Ultimately, our goal is to position Asimov Press as the leading magazine for long-form analysis of the scientific “machine”, culminating in a book-length compilation in the coming year.

Our metascience coverage will tackle questions like: What can alternative funding models teach us? Can we incentivize reform more effectively? How do tools like bioRxiv and Sci-Hub shape science? Who is experimenting with new ways of doing research? Through such questions, we want to explore not just the mechanics of science, but its purpose and potential. (If you're interested in writing about metascience, or you work at an organization that is experimenting in this space, please contact us at editors@asimov.com.)

Our second announcement, closely related to the first, is that we are hiring a part-time Researcher. This marks the first major expansion of our tiny team since launching more than a year ago. The Researcher will be a fully integrated part of our work, speaking regularly with scientists and collecting datasets for our "Data Briefs" series. Ideally, this individual will possess a strong understanding of biological sciences, a proficiency with data, and a talent for engaging deeply with scientific ideas. This role will begin as a three-month term, but we hope to expand it to a year (or permanently) if the fit is right. Click here to apply.

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Issue 06

Our latest issue will open, tomorrow, with a memoir recounting one researcher’s journey from being diagnosed with a hereditary form of cancer to navigating IVF, undergoing a total gastrectomy, and grappling with moral decisions amidst limited data. Her story is, ultimately, about breaking an intergenerational cycle of grief.

Over the next two months, new essays will appear weekly to fill out the issue. Corrado Nai contributes a “biography” of a blood-red microbe, Serratia marcescens, which has left an outsized mark on our understanding of how germs disperse within human bodies, buildings, and populations.

And whereas Serratia was used for tracing pathogens outside the body, Smrithi Sunil looks at a fabled protein used internally — green fluorescent protein. Sunil untangles the history of GFP, recounting how it went from a jellyfish to a cursory mention in a scientific paper’s footnote and then into the freezer of almost every biology lab in the world.

Speaking of pervasiveness, Metacelsus offers an extensive book review of Nicholas Wade’s The Nobel Duel, which recounts the race between two endocrinologists — Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally — to discover the structures of hormones in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite being published 44 years ago, The Nobel Duel remains pertinent for helping us understand the (sometimes) combative forces that drive research.

The book review not only highlights gruesome details, such as how the men’s teams “ground up literally millions of animal hypothalami, dissected from hundreds of tons of brains” to uncover molecular structures, but also interrogates science’s highest honor itself, asking how we might reform the Nobel Prize.

And finally, for those drawn to the speculative, we’ll feature new science fiction. Xander Balwit follows an obituary writer in a future where biological death is largely obsolete, asking what remains significant in a world without mortality. These pieces will be joined by several others, including a photo essay with researchers working to build an AI scientist.

We hope you enjoy Issue 6. And thank you, as always, for reading our work and being a part of our community.

P.S. All of the books for our second anthology are nearly finished, after delays, and we will ship out all orders before the end of the month. Thanks for bearing with us as we get things right, and please email editors@asimov.com with any questions. Also, we are reviewing applications for our writing fellowship with Works in Progress, but it will take time to get through them all. We hope to reach out to prospective fellows by the end of April.

Lead image by Ella Watkins-Dulaney.