Today, Asimov Press launches Issue 08, with a deep history of the world’s most commonly performed surgery. The author, Sangeetha Aravinda, traces cataract surgery's 4,000 years of evolution from a procedure involving thorns and breastmilk to a 20-minute operation using lasers and AI. Along the way, she asks a hard-hitting question: whether access to technology ought to be the truest measure of progress.

Over the next two months, new essays will appear weekly to complete the issue. Here is a look at other forthcoming articles:

• The Price of E. coli — Columnist Sam Clamons asks: What is E. coli already producing that we might be squandering? How many assorted proteins, RNAs, lipids, glycans, and metabolites are there inside a cell, and what might these components be worth if we could only find a way to retrieve and sell them?
• A Shift from Animal Testing — Journalist Celia Ford digs into what it will take for the scientific establishment to move away from animal models and embrace a new slate of non-animal methods (NAMs). Exploring everything from the “translation crisis” to how we can model toxicity using fluidics, Ford presents a clear-eyed case for where we are likely to see a shift and where the scientific status quo holds us back.
• Case Study on Nigeria’s GM Adoption — Cereal scientist Alex Wakeman speculates on why GM adoption is being driven by countries in the Global South. Wakeman explains what has been working well in countries like Nigeria, and why, in an increasingly globalized food system, sensible regulation is the only reasonable path forward for GM crops.
• Livers on Ice — Donna Vatnick spent dozens of hours observing a liver transplant while an MFA student. She not only takes us through the details of the retrieval and transplant, but also illustrates what it took to make such surgery possible at all. From animal-to-human skin grafts to immune rejection, Vatnik covers the transplant biology, medical ethics, and even organ markets in this hepatic deep dive.
• The Art of Drug Removals — Healthcare reporter Michael DePeau-Wilson uses the 50-year saga of oral phenylephrine to take us into the FDA’s drug removal process. In this analysis of how we evaluate drugs that can underpin billion-dollar markets and what the FDA misses when they overindex on safety relative to efficacy, DePeau’s helps us confront the tricky question of what we can and should expect from our drug regulators.
• Digital Scent — Biomaterials and computational biology researcher Taylor Rayne introduces us to the companies attempting to allow computers to smell, such as Osmo. In this beautiful essay on olfactory biology, Rayne explains the structure-to-odor paradox, why strawberries smell like strawberries, and how graphic neural nets are helping us make sense of scents.
• The History of the Electron Microscope — Repeat Asimov Press writer Smrithi Sunil elucidates the making of the electron microscope. Sunil describes the insights from physics and engineering that allowed us to go from looking at the leaves of a tobacco plant to actually capturing the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus.

... and many bonus articles.

{{signup}}

Updates

• Ulkar Aghayeva has joined Asimov Press as a columnist. She will write about biology, history, and philosophy of science. Ulkar’s science history blog is called Measure for Measure.
• Our friends at Works in Progress are now offering print subscriptions. They will deliver a beautiful magazine, featuring some articles not appearing online, every other month.
• We’ll be at the Progress Studies conference from October 16-19 in Berkeley. Come introduce yourself and pick up a copy of our most recent book.
• We hosted a biology trivia night in San Francisco. Enthusiasm for esoteric science history seems to be growing!
• Our GMO pop-up restaurant, FARMA, was covered in The Economist. “Credit for the meal’s conception belongs to Xander Balwit,” our editor-in-chief. “[Xander] wanted to present an optimistic vision of what the food industry could be like in 2055, based on real technologies in the world today.” The menu included a chicken-fried flank steak made from plant proteins, pork meatballs made from cultivated meat (thanks to Mission Barns), and many other futuristic bites.
• Also, Mission Barns is celebrating a historic first sale of cultivated meat products with special dinners in San Francisco. Xander Balwit attended.
• Our merchandise store continues to grow with new posters, hoodies, and hats. Get yourself some cool swag!

What We’re Reading

Books

• Replaceable You by Mary Roach
• Who Goes First by Lawrence K. Altman
• An Immense World by Ed Yong
• One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 by Rosemary Ashton
• Galileo’s Middle Finger by Alice Dreger
• A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design by Frank Wilczek
• Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 by Alexander Wragge-Morley
• The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson
• Beauty and Revolution in Science by James W. McAllister
• The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick

Articles

• “How to make an antibody,” Works in Progress
• “Experiments as performance art,” Kevin Munger
• “Why Romania excels in international Olympiads,” Palladium Magazine
• “Where are all the trillion dollar biotechs?” Lada Nuzhna
• “Biotech’s lost archive,” Institute for Progress
• “The case for crazy philanthropy,” Palladium Magazine
• “ChatGPT and the meaning of life,” Harvey Lederman
• Jacob Kimmel’s recent appearance on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast
• “Publishing for machines,” Andrew White
• “Why science needs outsiders,” Works in Progress
• “Progress Unraveled” by Spencer Wright
• “Everything I know about self-publishing,” Kevin Kelly
• “Code to complex: AI-driven de novo binder design,” Structure

{{divider}}

Lead image by Ella Watkins-Dulaney. Microfluidics background image by Patrick Almhjell, PhD.