These are essays and papers I return to when I want to think more clearly about biology, biomedical research, and scientific progress. They differ in form and ambition, but each has shaped my taste as a reader and writer.

This is not a definitive syllabus. It is a personal canon, and an evolving one.

  1. Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency, Jack W. Scannell et al. (2012)
  2. Predictive validity in drug discovery: what it is, why it matters and how to improve it, Jack W. Scannell et al. (2022)
  3. Is the cell really a machine?, Daniel J. Nicholson (2019)
  4. How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation, a conversation with Sydney Brenner (2014)
  5. A Future History of Biomedical Progress, Adam Green (2022)
  6. The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today, Alex Telford (2023)
  7. The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas (1974)
  8. The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure for decades, Sharon Begley (2019)
  9. The Scientific Virtues, Slime Mold Time Mold (2022)
  10. First Clean Water, Now Clean Air, Fin Moorhouse (2023)
  11. I should have loved biology, James Somers (2020)
  12. The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell, James Somers and Edwin Morris (2024)
  13. Biology is more theoretical than physics, Jeremy Gunawardena (2013)
  14. Can a biologist fix a radio?, Yuri Lazebnik (2002)
  15. Cells are very fast and crowded places, Ken Shirriff (2011)
  16. Life at Low Reynolds Number, E. M. Purcell (1977)
  17. Lena, qntm (2021)
  18. Sequences and Consequences, Sydney Brenner (2010)
  19. The NIH Report, Matt Faherty (2022)
  20. Simplicity in biology, Uri Alon (2007)
  21. A breakthrough from 60 years ago: “General nature of the genetic code for proteins”, Matthew Cobb (2021)
  22. Molecular Vitalism, Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, and Tim Mitchison (2000)
  23. The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge (1993)
  24. Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation, Brian Hanley, William Bains, and George Church (2018)
  25. Coming full circle—from endless complexity to simplicity and back again, Robert Weinberg (2014)
  26. Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973)
  27. The Impersonator: The Fake Data Were Coming From Inside the Lab, Uri Simonsohn (2024)
  28. The Longevity FAQ, José Luis Ricón (2020)
  29. The Perfect Human Is Puerto Rican, Lior Pachter (2014)
  30. No Evidence of Disease, Stephanie Bourque (2012)

If you read one of these, I would start with Scannell on R&D efficiency, Lazebnik’s radio essay, Somers on learning to love biology, and Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell.