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Stories We'd Like to Publish (Part II)

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Stories We'd Like to Publish (Part II)

A sizeable list, covering everything from "The $100 Electron Microscope" to "A Brief History of NSAIDs." Come write with us!
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It’s been a little over a year since we launched Asimov Press.

During that time, we released four issues of our digital magazine, printed and sold out of our first book, worked with dozens of writers, launched pre-orders for our second book, and published about 150,000 words of text.

All of this is possible because of you, our readers. Thank you for engaging, commenting, calling out our mistakes, and pushing us to publish better stories. As we enter 2025, we’ve noticed that our list of ideas has ballooned into the hundreds. We do not have the time or resources to pursue them all ourselves! So in the spirit of being open and bringing more ideas about scientific progress into the public realm, we are releasing our second list of Stories We’d Like to Publish.

If any of these ideas speak to you, please send an email to editors@asimov.com. Let us know why you’re a great person to tell this story and send some examples of prior non-academic writing (outlines are also welcome, so we can get a sense of how you might organize the article).

If we accept your pitch, we’ll support you during every step of the writing process, from outlining to copyediting to publishing. When the article is finished, we’ll also pay you and, perhaps, print your work in a forthcoming book. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to commission every pitch we receive.

Finally, if you don’t see an idea on this list that resonates with you, but still want to work with us — pitch us anyway! We are always looking for detailed and mechanistic stories covering biotechnology, the development of specific technologies and metascience, or arguments about how we can make science better or faster.

Young Man Reading by Jacob van Loo (ca. 1650)

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A Brief History of Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatories

Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) are among the most prescribed medications globally. This class of drug, which includes things like Aspirin and Ibuprofen, was estimated to have a market size of roughly $18,542.5 million in 2024, according to Cognitive Market Research. The same report suggested that in 2024, North America held a major market share, accounting for more than 40 percent of the global revenue, with a market size of $7,417.00 million. As the increasing prevalence of chronic pain conditions, an aging population, and a preference for over-the-counter pain management solutions make this market ever larger, we want to know the history (and contemporary discussions) surrounding this ubiquitous drug. We often forget to marvel at the basic medicine available to us today. However, it deserves acclaim. So whether you want to dive into NSAIDs, or other such “ordinary” and “commonplace” drugs, Asimov Press is looking to extoll the basics in the medicine cabinet.

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The $100 Electron Microscope

Manu Prakash, a bioengineering professor at Stanford University, is trying to build a $100 electron microscope — a machine that can cost millions! We’d like to commission a short article about this project that briefly explains the history of electron microscopes, their manufacture, and Prakash’s confidence that a $100 version is possible.

Dr. Prakash is one of our favorite scientists. His work is whimsical and joyful — done for the sake of discovery and play. His laboratory has also released other “frugal science” tools, including a paper microscope called FoldScope that costs less than a dollar to make and a 20-cent paper centrifuge, that might also be worth highlighting. (h/t David Lang)

  • Manu Prakash (Stanford)
  • Developing low cost vacuum pump to make electron microscope accessible to kids in classrooms (Experiment.com)

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Plastic-Imitating Plants: An Investigation

Boquila trifoliolata is a vine native to South America. It appears, at first glance, much like any other vine. But B. trifoliolata actually has an uncanny ability: It can mimic the leaves of plants growing nearby. Even when scientists grow these South American vines near a plastic houseplant, the vine will change the shape and appearance of its leaves to mimic the plastic ones. Some scientists think that B. trifoliolata is able to mediate such mimicry not through physical touch or chemical signals but through a sort of “primitive vision.” In other words, some scientists believe that these vines actually mimic neighboring plants by sight.

We want to publish a deep, investigative piece on this vine. The article should come to some sort of conclusion about whether or not these claims are likely to be true. We are also excited to see more coverage of plant intelligence and biology in general and would welcome other pitches on this subject.

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The State of Gene-Editing

There’s Cas9, Cas12, and Cas13. There are base editors, prime editors, and bridge recombinases. All of these tools work in slightly different ways and seem to be better or worse at slightly different functions.

We’d like to commission a visual essay (we’ll hire a scientific illustrator) that explains how these gene-editing tools actually work. The article will require a great deal of research into biophysical mechanisms and should also explain how each of these tools was invented, how they are being applied in the clinic (or elsewhere), and their efficiencies within the cell. We think the finished work could become a great and timeless resource for students!

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The Genius of Gerolamo Cardano

A Renaissance polymath born in 1501, Gerolamo Cardano was among the first people “to attempt a systematic study of the calculus of probabilities,” as Prakash Gorroochurn, associate professor of biostatistics at Columbia University, has written. Cardano also invented the combination lock, introduced binomial coefficients, published more than 200 scientific papers during his lifetime, and was apparently “the first European mathematician to make systematic use of negative numbers.”

Unfortunately, most of Cardano’s genius seems to have been forgotten. Therefore, we’d like to publish a short biography of Cardano, explaining the circumstances that led to his development of probability theory. Apparently, he was often short of money, and kept himself solvent by gambling. This article could basically be a book review, drawing heavily upon quotes, similar to this biography on Warren Weaver or this one on Elon Musk. (In general, we welcome other pitches about formidable scientific minds, especially those that have been undersung.)

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A Critique (or Defense) of GMOs

When we published a science fiction article about a fictional restaurant, called Farma, serving a pro-GMO menu, a couple of readers pushed back and suggested that we should have given more thorough treatment of arguments against GMOs.

Let’s do that.

The safety of GMO crops has been debated for decades. Critics talk about health risks and the monopolization of seed supplies by large corporations. We’d like to commission an essay that systematically lays out all of the arguments against GMO crops and responds to them, one by one, with data supporting or refuting them. The essay should give equal weight to the benefits of GMOs, including increased crop yields and reduced pesticide use (if applicable).

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A Q&A with Ilan Gur

Why has the UK gone from one of the world’s leading scientific countries — inventing everything from early computers to molecular biology — to relative stagnation? How, exactly, might one turn the ship around and reinvigorate science?

As CEO of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, turning the ship around is partially Ilan Gur’s job. Gur leads a team — one relatively insulated from bureaucratic oversight —  with £800m in funding earmarked to develop new science and technologies. Is he a new Warren Weaver or has something changed in modern science that makes it more difficult to forecast the future and predict the sources of breakthroughs?

We’re hoping to commission a Q&A with Ilan Gur (or other figures spearheading efforts to accelerate scientific progress). The questions asked should be at least on par, in terms of depth and research, with those asked by someone like Dwarkesh Patel.

  • ARIA
  • Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again (WIRED)

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A Look Inside FutureHouse

FutureHouse, based in San Francisco, is trying to build AI agents that can automate biology research. In a very short period, their team has released impressive tools — like PaperQA2 and LAB-Bench — to search the scientific literature or benchmark progress in AI tools for biology, respectively.

We want to commission a profile of FutureHouse that clearly explains what they are building, what the key bottlenecks are in AI tools for metascience, and how they prioritize problems. It could be similar to our prior article on Cultivarium (a non-profit building tools to engineer “weird” microbes). The article should also be more narrowly focused than this recent feature in Nature magazine.

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Alternatives to Peer Review

We recently published a “Defense of Peer Review,” steelmanning some of the reasons why peer review — despite its bias, delays, and gatekeeping — is mostly a good thing overall. Whenever you go out on a limb and defend something that people widely decry, you’re sure to get some pushback! We definitely did.

In response, we’d like to expand our steelmanning and publish a piece that goes the next mile. In other words, we want to publish a manifesto, of sorts, that clearly outlines how, exactly, scientists would review papers in an “ideal world.” The article should explain where peer review currently fails and how we can make it better. It should be a defined and testable proposal. The article should focus on specific strategies, their potential impact, and what a reimagined system could look like to enhance transparency, efficiency, and trust in scientific communication.

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Automation Bottlenecks

Many people dream of a future where AI-powered robots run their own experiments, learn from the results, and make Nobel Prize-winning discoveries. Anecdotal examples of this have already been published; for example, Carnegie Mellon scientists released Coscientist in 2023, a robot hooked up to ChatGPT that designs its own chemistry experiments to synthesize molecules. It seems to work really well!

Whether or not a similar robot could work for biology, however, remains to be seen. Biology is much harder to automate than chemistry. As Sam Rodriques has written:

Chemistry may be all heat, weighing, and mixing, but keep in mind that we recently discovered after 6 months of investigation that one of the projects in my lab was failing because a chemical that was leaching out of a rubber gasket in one of our cell culture wells was interfering with an enzymatic reaction.

If biological research is ever to be fully automated, then, a robot must “be able to pick up the Petri dish and notice that there is some oily residue floating on the surface that isn’t supposed to be there. Until then, humans will probably stay significantly in the loop.”

We’d like to commission an article that walks through the various bottlenecks hindering biological research automation and highlights some of the people and companies working to solve them.

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The Quest for a Strep A Vaccine

There is no licensed vaccine to prevent strep A infections, which kills perhaps a thousand people yearly in the United States. That is a small number relative to other infectious diseases, but one of the reasons a strep A vaccine is intriguing is because making one will be incredibly difficult; there are more than 200 types of bacteria that cause strep A, each carrying unique M proteins on their cell walls. And because strep A is somewhat rare, there aren’t major financial incentives to make preventative treatments.

We’d like to commission an article about strep A vaccines because many of the lessons gleaned from the piece will apply to other neglected diseases. The piece could be similar in style to, say, our recent article about tuberculosis vaccines (h/t Jacob Trefethen).

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Discoveries Ignored: Part II

Scientific history is replete with stories of scientists who made important discoveries but were ultimately overlooked or rejected, only to be recognized later. In 2020, José Luis Ricón published an excellent article highlighting some of these examples:

  • Jet engines, invented in 1937, were “stalled” by NASA’s precursor organization because administrators were “very pessimistic” about the technology.
  • Katalin Karikó, a key inventor of mRNA vaccines, had trouble getting funding for her work and almost quit science.
  • When Paul Boyer discovered how ATP energy molecules are made by a cell, the Journal of Biological Chemistry declined to publish it.
  • Kary Mullis’ paper describing polymerase chain reaction was rejected by both Science and Nature.

And so on. José has already done an excellent job, but we’d love to publish stories that either round up other “scientific rejections” or delve more deeply into individual examples. We think that, by doing so, we can reassure scientists that their work is important even when unappreciated by the powers that be!

  • Peer Rejection in Science (Nintil)

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Inside White Labs

White Labs, a bar with locations in San Diego and Asheville, looks similar to any other “hip” craft brewery. But if you look a bit more closely, you’ll quickly discover that they don’t only make beer, they also make the yeast that makes that beer. White Labs has developed 96 new yeast strains since 2015. Each strain has unique brewing properties; some can survive high pressures or high alcohol concentrations in the fermentation tank, whereas others exude particular flavors. We’re interested in White Labs because they are selling “human-modified” organisms directly to consumers, and that is somewhat rare.

We’d like to publish a photo essay that takes readers inside White Labs and explains their process for making new yeast strains. The piece should showcase their laboratories, fermentation rooms, and various beer batches.

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Inside a Synthetic Silk Factory

A few different companies are making synthetic silk from engineered cells, including AMSilk, Spiber, and Bolt Threads. Similar to the photo essay on White Labs, we’d like to commission a photographer and writer to go inside one of these silk-making factories and explain how it works. How are the cells engineered to make silk? How do they get the silk proteins out of them? How are these proteins then woven into actual textiles? And, importantly, why has it been so difficult for biomaterials to scale and get into the hands of everyday consumers?

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The Beauty of Cellular Noise

If you take two identical cells — same genomes, same number of plasmids, grown in the same environment — and peer at them beneath a microscope, you may begin to notice something strange: They differ, randomly, in their gene expression. In other words, each cell turns different genes on-and-off at different times.

This phenomenon is known as “cellular noise.” And, far from being a nuisance, these random fluctuations help populations of cells to quickly adapt to changing environments. Michael Elowitz's group at Caltech has published a great deal of work on cellular noise, and their papers have been seminal for understanding how organisms leverage it to survive.

We’d like to publish an essay celebrating cellular noise. This is quite open-ended, but the piece could explore why noise evolved (i.e. why it’s advantageous for cells to operate via stochastic, rather than deterministic, mechanisms), how it operates in organisms like E. coli, and how synthetic biologists are hijacking it to make more robust biological systems.

  • Stochastic Gene Expression in a Single Cell (Science)
  • Functional Roles for Noise in Genetic Circuits (Nature)

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Why Do Biologists Accept Experimental Failure?

Experiments in biology fail all the time. Even a technique as common as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, often has to be repeated twice or thrice before it works reliably. If you ask a biologist why this is, most will shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s just how it goes. Biology is messy!”

Biologists have accepted that few experiments work the first time. But does this need to be the case? Experiments should of course fail if a hypothesis is false, but why should they fail when the phenomena in question is true?

Having a tolerance for failure slows scientific progress. Experiments should be designed for success and replicability, yet the field seems resigned to inefficiency. We’d like to publish a short essay or op-ed about this issue, exploring why biologists accept failure and how we might nudge the culture toward a more exacting mentality. (h/t Erika Alden DeBenedictis)

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The Fallacy of Engineering Intelligence

We attended several events in 2024 wherein participants ask us, “What are the existing bottlenecks for engineering human intelligence?”

A blogger who goes by the alias GeneSmith has outlined several strategies to boost adult intelligence using gene editing. He aims to do this in the next 20 years, purportedly to stay ahead of AI timelines (and basically help ensure that humans can “keep up” with superintelligence.) His ideas have caught on and spread through the rationalist community, where many people seem to accept them at face value.

We’d like to commission an essay that critically examines GeneSmith’s claims, and walks through the existing bottlenecks limiting our ability to precisely, safely, or ethically augment human intelligence. We’d also be glad to commission a dialogue between GeneSmith and one of his critics. The essay should, at a minimum, touch on three things: Why it’s so difficult to choose genetic targets, why it’s difficult to deliver gene-editing payloads to specific parts of the brain, and why it’s difficult to avoid messing stuff up elsewhere in the body in the process (let alone getting clearance to run clinical trials).

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Rise of the Sewer

In 1858, London was blanketed by an odor so putrescent that it earned the moniker “The Great Stink.” The smell rose from the Thames, the river connecting the city to the English Channel and international trade routes beyond. According to some, like the legendary novelist Charles Dickens, it was not so much a river as “a deadly sewer.” As tides pushed rotting sewage, offal, and industrial waste back upstream, it stagnated and festered. Waterborne diseases abounded: between 1831 and 1854, cholera killed over 40,000 people in London across four major outbreaks.



It took over two decades, six million pounds, and the efforts of the visionary civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to finally subdue the stench and clean up London’s water. Today, wastewater treatment is one of the many modern comforts that has gone from miraculous to the mundane. By gaining a greater understanding of the infrastructure, engineering, and science involved in the collection and management of sewage, we can better appreciate what it takes to preserve public health.

We want to commission an essay that celebrates sewage. What stories can we tell about its management? When did we begin to lean into wastewater monitoring as a key part of epidemiological research? Which disease outbreaks, civic developments, or lesser-known figures have been lost in the bowels of history?

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Public Health Hysterias

When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was surrounded by fear, misinformation, and stigma, especially due to its initial high prevalence in marginalized communities. In 1981, the New York Times published an article about a “rare cancer observed in 41 homosexuals,” setting off a firestorm of public health hysteria. We know now that this disease was not cancer, or any other kind of mysterious gay “syndrome,” but rather a viral infection that attacks the immune system. 
There have been many other public health panics, from “Mad Cow Disease” to “Fluoridated Water.” And while these are often accompanied by public fear and speculation, they can also catalyze meaningful scientific advancements.

We would like to see some pieces that explore public health hysteria, especially those instances that have driven real reform. What can we learn from how health information (or disinformation) spreads and takes root in the public imagination?

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Surgical Progress

A few decades ago, gallbladder removal required an open surgical procedure with a large abdominal incision, resulting in significant pain, a lengthy hospital stay, and a recovery period of up to six weeks. With laparoscopic techniques — also known as “keyhole surgery,” because surgeons are now able to peer into the abdomen using minimal incisions — gallbladder removal has become significantly simpler.

There are many such cases of surgical innovation. Over the course of a century, laparoscopy transformed once invasive and dangerous surgeries, from egg retrieval for IVF to hernia repair, into minor procedures. Other surgical domains, such as various thoracic procedures, have been modernized by the addition of robots, which similarly aid doctors in precision and delicacy. That surgeries are getting safer and more innovative thrills us, and we are interested in commissioning pieces both about what more is on the horizon and how we got here. Is there a surgical tool with an improbable history? Is there a technique with a wild development history? Do you have an argument for how computer vision will transform the trajectory of surgery? How has a surgical technique invented in one context come to pervade others? Do advancements in cosmetic and aesthetic surgeries drive innovation elsewhere?

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Sleep Biology

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the eponymous protagonist was challenged by the Mesopotamian king Utnapishtim to stay awake for 6 days and 7 nights in order to achieve immortality. He was unable to do so. Apparently, humans are captive to their sleep cycles even if godhood is on offer.

In ideal circumstances, our circadian rhythms work well and regulate our hormonal cycles and mood. Other times, we’re plagued by insomnia and our health suffers, or we wish to overcome the constraints of our natural sleep cycles and stay alert for longer periods to be more productive. Are scientists any closer to being able to tinker with this cycle? A 2017 article reported that “scientists report that increasing the level of Bmal1 — a critical master gene that regulates sleep patterns — in skeletal muscle makes mice resistant to sleep deprivation.” A 2019 study identified a gene in a family that needs less sleep than others.

What other discoveries might move us closer to being able to regulate our sleep cycles at the molecular level without damaging our health?

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The Future of Pigment

From the Tyrian purple that signaled social status, sourced from the mucus of murex sea snails, to carmine dye used in textiles and paintings, sourced from cochineal scale insects, human beings have long been fascinated by pigment.

They have more than just an aesthetic and economic dimension. Fungal pigments have been proposed as a means of reducing the toxic impact of chemical dyeing and cool paint as a means of reducing temperatures in urban areas. And the genetics of plant pigments are even suggesting ways to boost the nutritional disease resistance and the nutritional value of food.

From interesting applications of pigment in biosensors and medical imaging to stories of its synthesis and derivation, we want to know more about this human obsession with insoluble color.

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Effect of Lab Space on Scientific Progress

Sam Bowman, the indefatigable YIMBY and our friend at Works in Progress, was recently on the 80,000 Hours podcast discussing the impact that lab space shortages might have on science and innovation. Host Rob Wiblin supplied the fact that “in London, there’s 90,000 square feet of lab space available; in the Boston area, there’s 14 million square feet of lab space.” This, Sam fears, may be what is stifling science in the UK. After all, Boston is virtually synonymous with biotechnology. He elaborates:

So when lab space is there, you may end up getting much more radical, innovative, bold experimentation alongside the stuff that we’re paying for. When lab space is constrained, you’re just going to get the kind of boring, conventional, move the world forward by a tiny fraction of an inch kind of work — that sadly we fund, and sadly we are prone to that kind of risk-averse type of work.

But the knock-on effect of lab space shortages could be that there is a considerable constraint on the kind of science that we want to get done. I think that’s really, really fascinating, if true.

It is an enormous hypothesis, and we also want to know if it is true. We would be keen to have someone do empirical/investigative research into this in an attempt to draw some connection between having the infrastructure to actually conduct science and scientific output. However, we know this is a massive question and are also generally interested in the effect that labs (their location, formality, architecture, etc.) have had on research historically. We are open to a range of responses to this and hope it gets people thinking!

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A Brief History of … Anything

Every tool and technique in science has a story. Usually, that story involves some combination of human ingenuity and iterative design. We’re interested in publishing “brief histories” (~3,500 words) that unearth the journeys behind biology’s most influential devices — from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s handmade microscope, to the modern electron microscope, to the bioreactor. How, exactly, did these inventions come to be? Which idiosyncratic characters shaped their paths? How did early prototypes evolve through time, and who championed their refinement?

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Digital Scents

In decades past, scientists invented technologies to transmit images, sound, and even sense of touch in various experimental forms — but scent has long been stubbornly confined to the physical world. But Osmo, a company that spun out of Google Research labs, is now trying to give computers a “sense of smell.” They recently “teleported” a smell across a lab using a blend of chromatography, AI, and a molecular reconstitution device. Their process has advanced from analyzing a slice of coconut to transmitting complex odors with increasing fidelity. By mapping molecules in the air, uploading them to a “Principal Odor Map,” and then reassembling them on the other side, Osmo has demonstrated how to digitize scents.

This raises a lot of questions, of course: How does one even “map” a scent? Which molecules are the hardest to capture, and which remain unknown? What does it mean for art, communication, and commerce if a singular aroma can be recorded and reproduced across continents? We’re commissioning stories that either dive headfirst into Osmo’s technology or explore the broader science of smell. Why has digitizing scent proven so difficult?

  • Scent Teleportation Update: We Did It! (Osmo)

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Biotechnology in China

China’s biotech scene is changing fast but is poorly understood by American audiences. We’re looking to hire a columnist to contribute regular (perhaps monthly) articles on China’s biotechnology scene, including startups in cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen. Each column will be relatively short — ideally less than 2,000 words — and we’ll pay you exceptionally well for your contributions. We’re especially keen to hire someone with firsthand access to labs. We’ll provide support for travel, too.

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Antivenom Production

Snakebites kill on the order of 100,000 people worldwide each year, especially in regions with limited access to quality healthcare and lifesaving antivenom. Behind every small vial of antivenom is a fascinating — and often overlooked — production pipeline, involving the collection of venom through tedious immunization protocols, all the way to the purification processes that render the final treatments.

We want to commission a photo essay that takes readers inside an antivenom production facility. If you’re a writer eager to explore snakebites, we’ll connect you with a photographer. If you’re a photographer keen on documenting this story, we’ll help match you with a writer. Beyond this specific topic, we’re always open to proposals for photo essays on other facets of biotechnology.

Thanks for reading. Again, you can send pitches to editors@asimov.com.

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Any part of this series can be read on its own, though the sections do build upon each other somewhat. Therefore, we recommend reading each piece in order.