Asimov Press is going on hiatus. While a few more articles will appear over the next month — and our stunning hardcover book, Making the Modern Laboratory, will come out this summer — operations will pause in April. All articles will remain freely accessible online.
As we prepare to pause, I want to celebrate what we’ve accomplished. In June 2023, Asimov Press was just a vague idea. (I remember posting the announcement from my phone in the Amsterdam metro, feeling a deep sense of fear about what we were starting.) A few months later, I brought on Xander Balwit. The two of us were its only editors and only full-time staff. We launched with about 7,000 subscribers, ported over from my personal blog, Codon. Our first article appeared in January 2024.
While I had attended journalism school and thought I knew about publishing, I soon discovered that literally everything — from managing people, to recruiting and paying writers, to fact-checking stories, printing books, and much else — doesn’t play out as it’s taught in school. By trial and error, Xander and I had to learn how to develop an eye for writers with exceptional promise, separate good pitches from vague ones, figure out which parts of a draft were most compelling, and make sure stories were told deeply enough to satisfy scientists, while remaining accessible to all “ambitious” readers.
Devon Balwit served as Copy Editor, helping us to convey these complex ideas in readable prose. In 2025, we hired Ella Watkins-Dulaney as our Art Director, and she promptly improved our header images and style. In the last several months, she has stepped into other roles as well, helping fact-check and compile the latest book. Ulkar Aghayeva composed and recorded the music for our podcasts, and also wrote several excellent articles for our pages. We’re also immensely grateful to the dozens of fact-checkers, artists, proofreaders, and writers who have contributed to maintaining a high bar of excellence at Asimov Press.
We’ve come a long way since our inception. Today, we have about 42,000 subscribers between Substack and our website. The press has published 149 original articles, reaching about half a million readers each month.
These articles have ranged from short to long, and from technical reports to history to speculative fiction. Some personal favorites have been The Penicillin Myth, about how Alexander Fleming’s discovery story may have been partly fabricated, How Nature Became a ‘Prestige’ Journal, What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?, and The Making of a Gene Circuit.
While many of our pieces were widely discussed, a handful made an even more tangible impact in the world. Our two recent essays on clinical trials — Clinic-in-the-Loop and AI Won’t Automatically Accelerate Clinical Trials — have been widely discussed in policy circles, as has the essay on China’s Clinical Trial Boom. The essay Mitochondria Are Alive became a bit of a rallying cry for funders considering new tools to engineer these organelles. An essay on artemisinin’s discovery was cited in discussions that led to the Research Revival Fund, a new nonprofit seeking to restore “neglected, illegible, or prematurely dismissed research.”
The Press has published and sold out of two anthologies. When we first tried our hand at printing books, we assumed we would lose a lot of money as printing is expensive, and around 96 percent of all books sell fewer than 1,000 copies. But in both cases, we sold thousands of copies, recouped our costs, and donated the profit to charities. I’m especially proud of our second book, the first commercially available book published in both print and DNA. It was mentioned in The New Yorker and featured in WIRED magazine. Thanks again to the companies that made it possible.
Our decision to pause is not related to funding. Asimov has supported us for the last two years, and we’ve received generous grants from Astera Institute and Stripe. But new projects have called away Xander and I, making it a good time to recalibrate.
For me, the greatest part of writing and editing is drawing closer to ideas and the people who generate them. Essays are a forcing function toward both. Great writers often find an exciting idea and decide to pursue it, only to confront a gap that nothing on the internet can fill — a question too deep or too specific to answer alone. And so the work begins: emailing and calling people, visiting where they work, hosting dinners, and sometimes flying around the world to understand it. The search for great ideas, and a deep understanding of them, is why I’ll keep writing, and helping others do so, for the rest of my life.
When Asimov Press reemerges, I know that those who lead it will be just as curious about the history and future of science as we have been. Thank you for taking this journey with us.
Until next time,
— Niko