Asimov Press

Nobody knows how many people died from the Black Death. Estimates range from 40 to 60% of Europeans. Data comes mostly from medieval regions of Italy, England, Spain, France and Germany — and is thin everywhere else. Even today, many countries fail to count deaths. What gives? Revisit the article by Saloni Dattani: https://lnkd.in/eiXCuDN4

For today's article, Willy Chertman (Biotechnology Fellow at the IFP – Institute for Progress) reviews "The Pursuit of Parenthood," a book documenting the history of IVF, uterine transplants, and more. The article explains how IVF was invented, why it spread swiftly in the 1980s, and how it has avoided federal-level oversight. Read the essay here: https://lnkd.in/ebWStK6f Chertman previously wrote a 40,000-word whitepaper on fertility trends, treatments, and pregnancies. It's an incredible resource. That article can be found here: https://lnkd.in/edT8epag

A new article about a little-known piece of scientific history!

On Friday, we published an op-ed arguing that mitochondria are not just organelles, but actually living organisms encased within cells. It's now been read by >100,000 people (a record for us)! We'd like to commission and publish more scientific op-eds that argue for new ways of thinking. So please reach out if you have any burning ideas! Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/esGs6KDR

Most biologists believe that mitochondria are merely cellular organelles, similar to the Golgi apparatus or endoplasmic reticulum. But a swelling tide of scientific evidence suggests otherwise: mitochondria are not just organelles, but their own life forms. Why? A few reasons. First, mitochondria 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. Second, they 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 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. Read our new opinion essay by Liyam Chitayat. https://lnkd.in/ehREU-bk

About 30 million people will soon be taking weight loss drugs in the U.S., according to estimates from J.P. Morgan. The market for semaglutide and similar drugs is also projected to swell to $71B in less than a decade. So how can biotechnologists scale-up to meet these huge demands??By moving Beyond Steel Tanks! After all, the total global bioprocessing capacity was estimated at 17.4 million liters in 2021, according to an analysis by?BioProcess International. Supplying just the U.S. market with Wegovy will, by 2030, require about one million liters of production capacity. It’s time to consider other potential scales for biomanufacturing, both below and above the level of the cell. Read our essay describing "out-of-the-box" ways to scale up drug manufacturing. And subscribe! By Elliot Hershberg and Niko McCarty for Asimov Press. https://lnkd.in/ewmK-yAB

A nonprofit called Pioneer Labs is engineering microbes to survive on Mars. But it won't be easy. The engineered cells must survive extreme radiation, perchlorate toxins, and average temperatures of -60 degrees Celsius. Devon Stork, PhD wrote about these problems, and hinted at how Pioneer might solve them, for Issue 02. Read and subscribe: https://lnkd.in/erC34tPq

THE LONG ROAD TO END TUBERCULOSIS ?? TB kills more than 1.2 million people each year. To prevent and treat it, though, researchers still use a vaccine from 1919 and similar antibiotic regimes to those used in the 1950s. Better vaccines, and AI-designed antibiotics, are coming?? This article was written by Kamal Nahas and concludes Issue 04 of our magazine. Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/enhs_AEf Subscribe to get Issue 05 when it launches!

We're wrapping up our final Issue for 2024 today. It seems like a good time to celebrate! ?? In the last 12 months, we launched this magazine, built a team of 6, printed our first book, and published more than 100,000 words about biotech and scientific progress. We are extraordinarily grateful to Asimov for funding our work and making this possible. They are an incredible team to work with, and gave us absolute freedom to publish anything and everything we wanted. Alec Nielsen really believed in us. Thanks also to Saloni Dattani, Tony Kulesa, Tom Ellis & Tessa Alexanian for advising us, and to Devon Balwit, Ethan Freedman & Merrick P. for a great deal of editorial help. And finally, thanks to Everything Studio for book designs and Bunsen for help building the beautiful website. We'll be back in 2025 with much bigger, more ambitious projects! - Sincerely, Niko McCarty & Xander Balwit

The CEO of?Anthropic, Dario Amodei, recently published an essay called “Machines of Loving Grace.” It sketches out his vision for how AI could radically transform neuroscience, economics, diplomacy, and the meaning of work. Amodei also imagines the ways AI could accelerate biological research and yield miraculous cures in the 21st century; everything from the prevention and treatment of nearly all infectious and inherited diseases to the elimination of most cancers. I really enjoyed the essay. In his article, Amodei does?acknowledge some real-world issues limiting scientific progress — such as the slow growth of organisms and tedious clinical trials — but mostly passes over the more general tools that will be required to accelerate research in the near term. Many of the bottlenecks slowing biology today are?biophysical, though, rather than?computational. Therefore, I’m using Amodei’s essay as a rallying cry for researchers to innovate their way past existing bottlenecks in wet-lab biology. In my latest essay, I argue that in order for 50-100 years of biological progress to be condensed into 5-10 years of work, we’ll first need to get much better at running experiments quickly?and collecting higher-quality?datasets. This essay focuses on how we might do both, specifically for the cell. Read LEVERS FOR BIOLOGICAL PROGRESS at Asimov Press. Thanks to Adam Marblestone, Xander Balwit, Alec Nielsen and many others for helpful feedback. https://lnkd.in/exiHjNnP