EBRC In Translation
EBRC In Translation
32. From Research to Readership: Writing Biotech w/ Niko McCarty
In this episode, we chat with Niko McCarty—a scientist turned writer who is the founding editor of Asimov Press and head of creative at Asimov. Niko takes us through his unexpected journey from biochemistry research to science journalism. He shares insights on transitioning from the lab to the press, crafting deep-dive narratives, and even pioneering projects like a book encoded in DNA. Whether you’re a scientist looking to sharpen your writing or simply curious about the art of storytelling in biotech, Niko’s advice and experiences offer plenty of food for thought.
Note:
During the episode, Niko mentions a blog post from Jason Crawford about positive science fiction. It was not posted at the time but has since been posted. You can read it here.
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Transcription:
Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.
Hello and welcome back to EBRC and Translation. We're a group of graduate students and post-docs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Andrew Hunt, a post-doc in the Baker Lab at the University of Washington. And I'm Heidi Klumpa, a post-doc in Moe Kahlil and Mary Dunlops groups at Boston University. Today we're talking to Nico McCarty, a scientist turned writer and journalist who is the head of creative at Asimov, the founding editor of Asimov Press and was previously the man behind Kodon Magazine. Thank you for joining us today, Nico. Thanks for having me. I'm wondering if you could start by introducing yourself and sharing the journey that led to your current roles at Asimov Press. What inspired the transition from science to journalism? Well, so I think I was really fortunate to go to an undergrad school that had really good writing programs. So I went to the University of Iowa. You know, I didn't know I wanted to be a writer. I did not like writing in high school, but the University of Iowa is a UNESCO city of, it's in Iowa City, which is a UNESCO city of literature with with Edinburgh, Scotland. And so these great writers would always come through like Stephen King would come through all the time and Roxane Gay and just really good writers all the time, lots of book events. And so I started writing for the local magazine called Little Village while I was studying biochemistry. Didn't really think about writing as a career at all. I went and did my master's and started a PhD. Didn't really think about it. I wrote a little bit just for fun. Like I wrote for Cinebio Beta and stuff when they used to publish articles more regularly. And then, yeah, the pandemic hit. I was in a lab at Caltech and I decided like, you know, I don't know when I'm going to be back in the lab. I might as well go try something else. And I think I like writing. And so I decided to drop out and I went to New York University to do a master's degree there in science journalism, connected with a professor there who wrote a book that I really enjoyed. This guy named Dan Fagan. He wrote this Pulitzer Prize winning book called Tom's River, which is about a cancer cluster in the town of Tom's River, New Jersey. And I really liked it. I emailed him. I'm like, hey, I really like this book. Can I go study with you? And he's a nice guy. And he took me into the program and he became one of my mentors. And that's really how everything came started. So I think I took a very traditional path. Looking back on it now, you know, and I'm sure this will come up later in our conversation, but I don't think people necessarily have to take such a traditional path or go to journalism school to actually become like a professional writer. Yeah. Yeah, cool. So as you were making that transition when you were deciding to move into journalism, like, can you walk us through a little bit more of your plan for that transition? And like, how did you decide to write the things that you were writing? Like, were you thinking, okay, I am going to get into doing this blog and or yeah, can you tell us a bit more about that? So I didn't even know what, when I made that transition, I remember moving to New York. It was the pandemic. I moved on to Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, right around the corner from Katz's Deli. And it was like desolate outside. This was really like, you know, I was moving into a closet, but it was still $26.50 a month or whatever. But that was pretty good at the time for like, for New York for that area. And I remember, you know, the reason I'm bringing this up is because I remember explicitly that at that time, I was not like writing consistently at all. Like my life was basically, I would take gigs, like people would email me and they'd say, oh, hey, Nico, we need a piece on this synthetic biology paper. Do you want to write it? Like send bio beta or whatever. And I would just take gigs, but I wasn't even pitching. I wasn't like, I did not take writing that seriously. So it's actually interesting in hindsight that I took such a dramatic leap because I didn't have to. And I also remember I was sitting in my apartment when I first heard about Substack, because I remember I was sitting at my desk in this tiny apartment. And on Twitter, somebody told me like, you know, I had published a blog or I said on Twitter, like, hey, I'm starting a blog called this week in synthetic biology. And I just posted it on, I can't even remember. I think I set up my own website and someone on Twitter was like, Hey, you should use Substack. So I hadn't even heard of Substack. And then I just started writing every week. You know, it just became like a, you know, I think it's good that I didn't commit to like, I'm going to write a full article every week. It was just a list of papers. It was just something easy I could do. It's like, I'm just posting links to papers in this document and sending them out and hoping it's useful. And I think that's actually the thing that got the ball rolling on like consistency is just doing something easy that provides value to people. Like I wasn't trying to be a great writer or grow a true newsletter. I was just trying to provide value to the reader. And that's really how I got the first audience. And so actually, that's my advice to people who want to write is like, you don't necessarily need to start by writing these amazing pieces about, you know, 6,000 word pieces. Like that's very difficult to do consistently. Just like think about how can I provide value to my audience? How can I be useful? And people will find that and you'll grow really quickly. And then later you can transition and do like the thing that you actually want to do. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that seems like good advice. We were curious then, how does, yeah, because you kind of start with this, I'm doing something small consistently, and then now you're recently founding Asimov Press. So we're curious, I guess, can you tell the audience a bit what it is, how it came to be, and the vision behind it? And we were curious when you're thinking about why should this thing exist? Did you think about like, what are gaps in the landscape of existing outlets or formats that mean that we need to have this thing? So the literal implementation of Asimov Press was, I was writing for Works in Progress, which is this online magazine. They're funded by Stripe Press. They publish long form pieces about progress writ large. So progress in science, progress in architecture, in construction, all these different areas. And it's like a very quantitative long form magazine. So it's really writing for the nerds, like numbers and charts and evidence of, you know, this is how a thing was done in the past, and this is how we should do it in the future. And I really like that. Like, that's the writing that appeals to me, that I don't get a lot when I read, you know, like I have subscriptions to the New Yorker or the Atlantic or Wired, right? Like, I like that writing. I enjoy those pieces. But, you know, as a scientist, the thing that I always feel is missing is like the really deep mechanistic quantitative stuff that will stand the test of time. Like, if you look at the biotech writing landscape outside of Substack, like even outside, so like professional outlets, it's just really bad. And, you know, I'm sorry if like I, you know, I'm not going to name any outlets, but like, it's a lot of just rewriting press releases, or, you know, aggregating stuff or making lists of like top 10 reasons China's the future of biotech. You know, it's just like, there's, you know, I think STAT has done really great reporting, like Sharon Begley is amazing, you know, so there are outlets for sure that do great long form explanations about biotech. But I really felt like that was missing when I was writing for Works in Progress. And I'm good friends with that team now, you know, we work together a lot. But, you know, even they acknowledge that like science is not their main focus, you know, they've published some great biotech pieces. But I just felt like there's so much more to tell. And so that's the exact pitch. I wrote a Google Doc, a one pager, I gave it to Alec Nielsen, the CEO of Asimov. And he's like incredibly supportive. He's the person who was like, yes, go do it. Very few questions. It was like, you know, of course, I had to write more documents, like what is the budget? Let's design a budget from the bottom up. What do you actually need? What sorts of pieces will you be publishing? How will you know if you're successful? You know, which is very difficult as a writer, like the metric that always comes into our head is just number of subscribers or size of audience. But is that actually the metric you should be pursuing? You know, I don't think Asimov Press, we can't compare ourselves to like a no opinion or a newsletter that has 250,000 readers. I don't necessarily think we'll ever have that size of an audience because it is quite niche what we're doing. So we had to decide all of that ahead of time. Like what are we doing? Why? And then Asimov, you know, I think we just got really lucky. Like Asimov is our biggest supporter. They fund everything. So they give us our discretionary budget. They fund my salary and another person's salary. So we have two full time editors and then we have a team of freelancers. And right now it's entirely supported by Asimov. So we just we got lucky that, you know, there were people who really liked what we were doing, believed in us and said, yeah, go do it. And that's really how it came to be. So a lot of it is just networking, but not even networking writ large. It's like finding your one champion, you know, finding one person who is like powerful, who can help you go do this ambitious thing. Did you know ahead of time that Alec was a good choice? Or like, or did you maybe think about pitching multiple different people? Well, so now I'm pitching different people because we want to grow, you know, so we're bringing in money now from from other funders. And I did know that Alec was a good supporter because I joined Asimov, not as Asimov Press, like this was never on the agenda. When I joined Asimov, my job, like you said, was just head of creative. And it was, you're going to come in, you're going to start writing our blogs, you're going to figure out, you know, Alec had always had this sort of vision of like, Nico will figure it out. So he read Kodon, which was the newsletter you mentioned. I, you know, I wrote a newsletter called Kodon, which was really just some brief write ups of different papers each week, and then a bunch of links. And so again, it was just providing value weekly to synthetic biology readers. Alec was a fan of that. And he's the one who hired me and was like, you know, initially, you should probably just write about some of the stuff we have going on. But he made it clear that like, he was supportive of bigger endeavors. And actually, one of the things I pitched, which I haven't done, but, you know, I can talk about it is kind of like a Bon Appetit test kitchen for biotech. So I wanted to like film scientists in the lab, but almost actors, like not real scientists, like more like actors, like amateur scientists. And, you know, give them tasks like, oh, you have to make spider silk from yeast and like, it's like the Bon Appetit test kitchen where they have to like figure out how to make this thing with bioengineering. I still think that's great. I already started. Yeah, I still think that could be very cool because like you'd learn about biotech as you're watching, but it's kind of comedic or fun. Like that show on Bon Appetit where they have to like remake candies. Do you remember that show when they were very popular? They would try to make skittles from scratch or try to make. Yeah. Like I loved that show. So my favorite was it's alive, maybe fitting for biotech. Nice. Well, very cool. So I wanted to pivot back to something you mentioned a little bit earlier, which is that, I mean, from my own experience, I didn't really grow up enjoying writing and it seems like a lot of scientists and engineers have sort of had similar experiences. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about like why you think scientists should write more and sort of the role that that plays in science and maybe just, yeah, I don't know, make a pitch for writing, I guess. Like, yeah, what ended up like, how did you fall in love with writing more? Well, so the way that I, you know, I guess there's two parts to that. The way that I fell in love with writing was that I was basically forced to write. Even today, I don't really love writing. Like, you know, most days I don't, you know, run down to my office and like giddy with excitement. It's like I write stuff because I have to write stuff. And, you know, now I'm, you know, I'm lucky enough now that I get to choose really the things that I'm writing. Like a lot of writers don't necessarily get to choose. You know, I worked as a data journalist for about a year at the Simons Foundation in New York. And a lot of what I wrote about was just the editor wants somebody to write this thing. You know, a paper's coming out. You know, my first job was actually a retraction watch. So my first boss was Ivan Aransky, the one of the founders of Retraction Watch. So I used to write about people doing bad things. I thought that was great. That's like, that actually did get me interested in writing because, you know, I was writing about things that I thought were really compelling. But in terms of like self-motivation when I was younger, I never really enjoyed it. I think I was fortunate that I had, you know, I had a mentor at the University of Iowa who was like super serious about writing. And, you know, basically her, I don't know how much to say, but she would help people apply for fellowships. And so like if you wanted to apply for a Fulbright fellowship, you would work with her and she would help you with your application. And like she was just an amazing teacher because she was so serious about the process. So if you say like, you know, she would give you a deadline. And if you didn't finish your personal statement, she would like roast you. Like what are you doing? Like you're wasting my time. Like I told you that I need this and you're wasting my time. But in a nice way, like, which is why I'm not saying their name, but that like changed my life, honestly. She really held me accountable and was like, you can do better. And told me things to avoid. Like don't say you're passionate about something. Like what does that even mean? Everybody's passionate about everything. You know, like I learned a lot about sort of unspoken things and personal writing from her. And then from there, I guess like writing is the thing that has always changed my life. And so I regularly question, is writing the best thing I could be doing? Why don't I just go build a company? You know, aren't I worried about AI taking this away? Like, is this really still my competitive advantage of like writing? And I question that all the time. But then I always come back to this idea of like, writing is the thing that just again and again and again has changed my life. I'll write something and somebody will reach out. I'll write something and people say, let's start a writing fellowship together. I'll write something and people say, hey, I'll give you money to start a magazine. And so it's like, I think the power of writing is just, it's a beacon. When you write things and you put it in public, if people like what they read, you get opportunities, you meet people, you go present at places. Like it's the currency of the internet in a way. You know, there's other currencies, like videos are a currency, but I think videos in terms of information density to amount of time invested, videos are not as good as text. The beauty of text is that for every hour invested, I can insert 2x or 3x the information density of a video. Like writing is the medium of information in terms of ease of presenting information, I think. Like a 6,000 word essay that we publish at Asmopress might take a documentary to convey the same level of information. And we don't have to think of visuals nearly as much as a video. So in terms of why scientists should write, you know, I really think it's about ideas. If you're just, you know, if I make an argument about why someone should just write and not put it in public, I would say it's to think. Like when you sit down to write and you send it to a reader, they find holes in your arguments, they find, you know, logical leaps. That's a lot of what I spend my time doing as an editor is I get drafts from writers and I say, wow, this is a logical leap. Like this transition does not make sense to me. How did you go from here to here? I don't understand what you mean by this. Can you elaborate? And all of that is really about thinking. Like I'm telling the writer that they need to think more deeply and that they really need to be the expert of this material before the piece is ready to be published. When you read a piece that is just crystalline in its prose, like it's so beautiful, the idea is so succinct, it answers all your questions. I think that's really a sign that the writer is a master of the subject and they've really thought about even the basic things. And I remember when I was an undergrad, I would be presenting research at a poster conference, let's say, and people would sometimes come up and ask the most basic questions. Like what is the mechanistic difference between type one and type two diabetes? I'll never forget that because I was studying diabetes and someone asked, what is type one versus type two mechanistically? And I didn't know at the time. I was like, oh, I'm injecting these mice with drugs to try to, but I don't actually know the depths. I haven't plunged the depths of my knowledge on this subject. I think writing does that even in private. In terms of why you should write in public, well, it can change your life. It's a beacon. It's a way to get ideas out. I don't think you necessarily need to publish a paper to be a beacon. You could publish a great blog, but it is hit and miss and people should temper their expectations. Like a lot of what you write will not go viral. A lot of what you write will not enter the discourse. Most of what we publish at Asimov Press just, you know, it's read by like 20,000 people, but some things that we publish are read by 150,000 people. And it's just, I still, even now cannot predict that super well. You know, we recently published a piece about why mitochondria are alive. And that was by a PhD student, written by a PhD student at MIT. And I did not expect that to be popular, but it's now by far our most popular piece. Maybe because it's short and the headline is punchy, like mitochondria are alive. Like that's punchy. But yeah, I think those are some of the reasons people should write. I really love that. Yeah. I think it's very compelling. Yeah. Sort of what I wish someone had talked to me about writing when I was first learning to write. Great. Yeah. I feel like it came up in grad school a lot because my PI would always be sort of like, write the abstract of your paper. Because he's like, this is a way to think about like, why your project should exist because you need to think about the motivation. But then also these logic of like, why do these pieces of data fit together in the story they tell? And it's interesting you say that because usually there's something called ideas first editing. And so this is something that Works in Progress does. This is something that we've co-opted at Asimov Press. But the idea is that we won't even commission a piece until the nut graph is clear, until the idea is clear. And so there's this element of essays called the nut graph, which is like the billboard or the thesis of the piece. And it usually comes, well, it always comes in the introduction. So, you know, essays are not written chronologically. You have an introduction and then usually you go back in time and give the history, right? But usually the introduction starts with an anecdote. You're inserted into the story. And then there's the nut graph. This is what I'm going to tell you in the rest of the piece. And then you go back in time and you start chronologically, usually is how a long form piece is structured. And that nut graph is very similar to the abstract. It's like, this is why I'm writing the piece and what you can expect to read in the piece and why you should read the piece, why it's interesting. That's called the nut. And it's very similar to an abstract or like to the first or to the last paragraph of an introduction in a research paper. But if you read the introduction of a research paper, the last couple of paragraphs usually are like, here's what I'm going to tell you. Like, we will show, you know, we demonstrate that X, Y, Z happens and, you know, and then they hint at the conclusion even. That's basically the nut graph in writing. And so a lot of our writers, when they pitch us, and we can talk more about this, but, you know, the pitch should have the nut graph. It should say, what is this piece really about? Why does it matter? Why should the audience care about this? And a lot of people actually don't know the answers to those questions. You know, they come into a piece more thinking like, I want to write about gene drives. And it's like, well, that's not a story because there's no thesis or momentum or like destination. The beauty of the nut graph is that it gate keeps the creative process. So instead of saying, I'm going to write about all of gene drives, which is just overwhelming, you know, you're going to get lost in the pursuit of creating that. The nut graph tells you exactly what you're trying to say. And it streamlines your reporting. It streamlines the information you need to present. And it's really useful in that way, right? Like, usually we're at our most creative when we're bottlenecked, when we're given criteria. That's like when the creative juices really flow. So I think it's actually similar. What you're saying, like, write the abstract first, think about the nut graph first when you write an essay. It's a very similar concept. Definitely. We may have touched on this a bit, so we could just guide to skip it. But we kind of wanted to ask, just like looking at your CV, for example, as you've spoken about your writing experience spans from like very focused topics to maybe like broader reflections, like thinking about meta-science. So I was curious if you see sort of distinct categories, like types of writing and you want to ask how you've chosen what to work on at different stages of your career, maybe the answer is you. I don't know how much choice you had, but yeah, what do you think about kind of, yeah, what to create? Well, I definitely have the most creative freedom now, which is good. Of course, when I started, right, it's like you said, people would tell me what to write about. So I wrote about honeybees disappearing from central Iowa. You know, I've written a lot about retractions, the stories of how papers got pulled and retracted and people committing fraud or manipulating figures. I've written a lot about autism and neuroscience and new neurotechnologies. That was my job at the Simons Foundation. And now I write a lot about biotech. I used to work at a nonprofit called New Science, and we wrote about meta-science. My job was to write about meta-science and, you know, how to make science better. And now, you know, I write a lot about synthetic biology, but I'm even taking another detour now, which is like, I just finished writing a biography of Gregor Mendel, which is not something I've ever done before. So I wrote my first biography. It's like 6,500 words about things about Gregor Mendel that most people don't know about. It's basically all the things I had no idea that he did. You know, so everybody knows that he bred peas and discovered the laws of inheritance, but like he did a bunch of other stuff. Like he was actually, when he died, he was more known as a beekeeper. So his obituaries are all about his beekeeping prowess. And he was very good at making better honey producing bees. And he also refuted a lot of Charles Darwin's ideas in his lifetime. And I never knew that. And also Mendel is the first person to provide quantitative evidence that basically the egg and the sperm equally contribute information to an offspring. So before Mendel, that was widely debated. People thought that the egg was just like a vessel to grow the embryo, but that the sperm carried all the information. And so he actually did his crosses in both directions, which I think most students don't hear about. So instead of just doing like transferring the pollen from this plant to the whatever pistol or whatever of this plant, he did it in reverse as well and showed that the offspring were the same every time. The ratios of the phenotypes were the same regardless of where the pollen came from. And he's the first person that like, I never knew that. So this biography is all about these really interesting things about Mendel that are underrated. And I read a bunch of books and reviews on his life for that. It took me like a month of research. So I'm doing all kinds of things now. I don't think there are any guiding principles, to be honest. I really hold two categories of ideas in my mind. One is what I call the deep dive. It's like, someone should write the definitive piece on X. So this is very much like the works in progress approach. Like, you know, I was talking to Saloni, Dottani a couple days ago about like, someone should write the definitive piece on where antibiotics come from. Like, that's interesting that it's almost closer to a topic. It's like, there's genome mining, there's natural discovery. Now there's AI design of antibiotics. Like, let's publish a piece about like, the definitive piece on where antibiotics come from. So I've done some pieces like that. That's one category. And I would say the other category is like the, I think of the classic essay. So I have some pieces that are just like, it's an idea that I want to convey. And it's more quick, punchy, more like an op-ed. So you know, I have a piece I'm working on about like, why we should build an E. coli Institute. And what would that actually look like? So it's a little shorter. It's like 2000 words. You know, it's more of an idea. I would call it idea essays. And then I guess the third category is explainers. I think a lot about explainers. They're not as popular as the other categories. Like I'm writing an explainer now on just the repressilator. So, you know, I've noticed that, you know, people take their audiences for granted. Sometimes they assume that their audience won't be interested in something because it seems basic once you're really deep in a field, but then it ends up being surprisingly popular. It's like a few months ago, for example, the New Yorker published a piece on the quest to create synthetic cells. And everything in that piece was like many years old. You know, like it's about J. Craig Venter and like stuff they did forever ago. And it was like an extremely popular piece online. And so sometimes I see stuff and I'm like, okay, an idea that seems obvious to me might be really enjoyable to our readers. You know, so like an explainer on protein design, an explainer on how the repressilator was actually built and how it works with like an interactive to tune its dynamics. Like sometimes I think about those like, so yeah, I think that's kind of a long winded response, but I tend to think in three categories. But of course, Asmopress also publishes science fiction, but I would say I'm just not, you know, I've thought about writing fiction, but it's just not something I've done professionally yet. Cool. Long winded, but great. No, that's exactly what we wanted to hear. So we've been curious to like, it's been interesting watching you sort of figure out your writing career. It seems like you've approached it with very much of a founder mentality and you've kind of just created opportunities for yourself as you went along. So can you talk a little bit about what are some of your favorite projects that you've helped create and maybe some lessons you've taken from them? Yeah. So, you know, I think before Asmopress, the biggest, most ambitious project that I had worked on, I guess there's a couple. So before Asmopress, first, when I was a data journalist, I did this big interactive project called the Autism Drug Tracker. That was really my first, like someone believed in me enough to give me a budget to go build something. It's called the Autism Drug Tracker. And I found all the clinical trials. I scraped all the clinical trials ever for related to autism. And I put them in like this configurable database, made an interactive display. People could search or winnow down results and find what they needed. That was a big project and I enjoyed that. But then when I published, you know, you wanted lessons. So I'll try to remember the lessons. When we published that, I remember just like nobody cared. That was a big lesson for me. Of like, you might invest a lot of time in something and just nobody cares. And that's just how the game of writing works. Like a lot of our most popular tweets are the things that came to us and almost look stupid in hindsight, right? Like it's the same with essays. It's like you might invest a ton of time in something and just nobody cares. Well, it's not that nobody cares. It's just like, it's not nearly as popular as that other piece that you're not nearly as proud of. And I think that's normal. So I learned that from that first project. The second big project I worked on was at New Science. We published a report called, it was called the NIH report. And it was basically like hundreds of pages about the NIH and its failures. And so I was working with a writer on that over weeks and weeks and weeks. And it ended up becoming extremely popular. And it was excited in congressional hearings and stuff like that. So it was by far the most like influential thing I had worked on. And I don't know what I learned from that, but you know, I learned about working with people, editing big projects, holding people accountable to deadlines. Yeah, I don't know. And then, you know, the most recent big project was of course at Asmopress, we're publishing books. I love working on books. I love working on physical copies. But a lot of that is not my doing. It's about just hiring great people. And so I think that is like one of the most powerful lessons I've learned recently. It's just like how to identify and convince really good people to work with you. And you know, I found some strategies to do that. So we work with these great designers in New York. They're called Everything Studio. It's a husband and wife partnership. And they design our books. They just designed our second book. So I guess I can talk about this because, you know, the podcast won't come out before we launch, but on December 22, we are announcing our second book. And it's really cool because we encoded the whole thing in DNA. So this probably seems gimmicky to synthetic biologists, but I think readers will really like it. We worked with three companies, Catalog, Plasmatsaurus, and Imaging, which is a capsule, a bio storage company in France. And we made a thousand copies of the book in DNA, packaged them into stainless steel capsules without moisture or oxygen. So they'll last for about, the half-life is 40,000 years. And we're selling a thousand book capsule copies. We worked with Jason Carmen's film studio to make a great video. So it was like this great project where we had to bring so many different people together. There's the book designers who want to design something. The style we've gone for is like 1960s New England Journal of Medicine. So it's like very professional, very classic vintage feel, which I like. But then we had to rope in companies and convince them to work with us on a project that we cannot afford as a publisher. We have to convince them through marketing purposes and convincing a film studio to work with us. It was a really great project and one where I did almost nothing. And yet I'm still extremely proud of it because it's like you bring all these people together, which is really like a superpower. So that's the other thing as a writer. I think a lot of people assume writing is like a solitary thing, but as you scale, it really is just like contention on how good are the people you surround yourself with because that will just enable you to do more ambitious projects. How good is your editor? How good is your copy editor and your fact checker? Like all of these things really matter and they add up over time. Very cool. Well, we're looking forward to that. I think it's fun to get the sneak peek. I guess we also wanted to ask about, and maybe this has come up a bit, but as a scientist turned journalist, are there skills from your research background that proved valuable in your new roles? And maybe also does engaging with science as a journalist feel different from doing so as a scientist? Yeah, I think there are definitely things I learned. The obvious answer is like how to look into a problem. But I think the deeper answer is that if you read most news coverage, most journalism coverage, it's very shallow. And I think that's like a widely held critique of the mainstream media is that when they report on a science paper or a finding, a lot of what they say just comes from the press release and it's quite shallow and there's not necessarily opposition or deep mechanistic explanations. If there's a new cancer drug discovered, do they walk you through the target? Do they walk you through the mechanism of how this was discovered? Probably not. But that's something we try to do at Asmar Press. And so this is not even necessarily a skill only held by scientists. I think anyone, of course, can learn this skill just like anyone can do science. But it really is like, are you satisfied with the answer? And just like not being satisfied with the answer. So we get a lot of pieces, like for example, we're getting ready to publish a piece about adjuvants, which are things you add to vaccines to make them more potent. And we've been using adjuvants for like more than 100 years. So the first vaccines did not have adjuvants. Then this guy, this French veterinarian named Gaston Ramon discovered that you could add stuff to vaccines to trigger a higher immune response, a more effective immune response. Those are called adjuvants. A piece like that not only has to talk about the history of how adjuvants were discovered, but like really it has to walk you through the mechanism of like, how does a normal vaccine induce an immune response in this memory of T cells? And how do adjuvants change that mechanistically? And that was missing from first drafts, right? So it's something we really have to push writers of like, okay, you say adjuvants trigger an immune response, right? That would be a normal writerly thing to say. Like adjuvants make the immune response stronger. Like that would be a very fine thing to say in English class in your essay, right? But like, you know, I think our strength is like really deep biotech editors is we're like, what does that actually mean? How do you know? Like tell it, like tell me, like tell us like really what the truth is. And so, you know, I think that's like one of our scientific skills, if you will, of like, you know, but some scientists also don't have that training. I think it's like something you have to convince yourself of, like you have to push yourself to do that. You know, I was just fortunate again to have mentors who were like, you know, my first mentor at the University of Iowa would always say, what is the mechanism? Like that was his like catch line. It's like, what is the mechanism? Because he just wanted to know like, the mechanism and he would leave talks and be like, he doesn't have a mechanism, you know, like he really just cared about the mechanism. So that's something we continue. And then what was the second question, Heidi? Oh, we were curious how if you feel that engaging with science as a journalist is a different skill than engaging with it, like as a practitioner or a scientist? Yeah, I think 100%. So first of all, I guess what I would say is when I was a professional journalist, so you know, I have my diploma, and I'm like a card carrying journalist, it's very serious, I work at a at a real news outlet, you are basically taught in journalism school, that sources are not your friends. Like you don't want to be deceived or have conflicts of interest, like this is ingrained in you at the conventional journalism schools, like schedule the meeting, get the quotes that you need, and get out. Like never share a draft with a scientist, never tell them what you're going to publish. Like you are the expert, you are the writer, the scientist is just giving you, you know, answering questions and giving quotes. That's that's how I was taught. And obviously, I don't like that because I was like, I was a scientist, I'm friends with many scientists, I'm friends with many writers, like why can't I be friends with both people? Why does it have to be so extractive? Like journalism really did feel to me extremely extractive. It's like a 30-minute call ends and they're like, okay, we'll see, I'll send the piece when it comes out, right? Like that's very conventional. And obviously, since then, I've been interviewed by mainstream news outlets, and it's still that extractive thing, right? It's like, okay, here's my list of questions, please answer these. You know, it's like, there's no joy, camaraderie, and that sort of dynamic. You know, at Asimov Press, we consider ourselves to be credible journalists. We still do not send pieces to sources. We don't let people change the things that we write. We're still editorially independent. But you know, it's different because I have to do the fundraising. So I have to get money from people so that we can continue our work. Like that's in a way a conflict of interest that journalists don't have to deal with. So you have to choose the right funders so that you don't become, you know, what's the word, you don't become infiltrated with people who want to control what you're saying. And so fortunately, Asimov does not try to control anything that we do. They're great, you know. So yeah, anyway, the dynamics are very different. I see myself now as more of like a scientist. So I talk to scientists, I hang out with scientists, I want to know their ideas, I want them to come write for us. If you have an interesting idea, I want to hear about it. You know, I don't really do conventional reporting anymore. So I rarely will reach out to someone and be like, I'd like to interview you for this piece. If anything, I'll just like ask questions over email or say, Hey, let's go get coffee or whatever. Like I want to build more serious long term relationships. And I don't think I'll ever go back to just like journalism in a conventional sense, because I just prefer this so much more than the life of a journalist. Yeah, you just you just touched on this a little bit, but we were really curious about content creation and funding sustainability, basically. And, you know, for example, our podcast, we're supported by EBRC, and we all volunteer to come do interviews. And so could you touch a little bit more on that, like, economic sustainability of what you're doing? And and like, yeah, like, who are the types of people you want funding your work? And how does that influence the work you do and the identity of what you do? Yeah, that's a great question. And I, you know, I think I like it, because I never heard people talk about this ever. When I started to do this, like, nobody knew this stuff, except for the people who had done it before. Right? Whereas I had heard a ton of advice about just writing, you know, everybody talks about writing. But like, it's really hard when you try to create the thing. And so, you know, we learned a lot about publishing and printing and funding and this from works in progress and also from asterisk magazine. So we're all in slack groups together. And we these sort of digital magazines talk to each other quite a lot, which has been great for us. So in terms of funding, you know, at first, I can talk about like how much it actually costs. So we don't run ads, we have no income stream. What when we published our first book, we lost quite a bit of money. Actually, it's extremely expensive to print things. So like full disclosure, when people write, like an essay for us, that is short, so like a 2000 word essay, an op ed, you could call it, we typically pay $1,500. When somebody writes a deep dive for us, we typically publish like $2,000. The motive for people to write deep dives usually isn't profit incentives. Like, for example, works, I just wrote for works in progress about animals as chemical factories. So it was like one of the pieces in their latest issue. And I wrote it with my colleague, Xander Bulwit, who was the editor in chief of Asimov Press, by the way. And we wrote it together. And my check was 1250. And like that took me like a month of work. So it's really not about the pay. It's like you love the magazine or whatever. And so yeah, so that's that. We publish about 50 pieces a year. We try to publish every Sunday. And so if you think about it, we pay, you know, anywhere from like 60 to 80 grand a year to writers, I would say, because I published some pieces, Xander writes some pieces. So we're not always paying a writer every week for a piece. So I would say we maybe publish like 35 to 40 outside pieces a year. And we have to pay for those. We have an editorial team. So we have an amazing copy editor named Devin Bulwit. We have freelance editors like Ish Friedman and Brady Huggett. And, you know, and we send them stuff. And sometimes they do freelance editing. We pay them an hourly rate. And then we have a fact checker too. His name is Merrick. And we send him stuff for fact checking. He's just like a brilliant biotech knowledgeable person. And we pay him an hourly rate. Printing is extremely expensive. Book designers will charge, you know, I don't want to say specific rates, but, you know, we got a bunch of quotes and book designers charge between 8,000 and 20,000 to design your book. Printers, depending on the size of your print run, the real cost of printing is not in the printing the 3,000th copy. It's in printing the first copy. It's getting the stuff ready, so to speak. So the larger your print run, the cheaper it becomes per book. So we did a kind of a small print run. I think we did like 1,700 copies, but ended up commissioning about 2,000 copies. And it was like $14 a book, which is so 20,000 plus dollars. And then we sell them for 20. And we had to pay the designers, right? So we lost, you know, we sold out of our books, but we give some books away. You know, so we ended up losing books. The other thing is with every book, we promised to donate profits to a charity that matches the book. So like our first book was about origins, the origins of biotech. And one of the pieces was about malaria. So we wanted to donate to the malaria consortium, which vaccinates kids against malaria. So we still made that donation. So like we lost a lot of money, but it's baked into our operating budget. So Asimov is really supportive. They entirely fund us right now. They're also funding us next year, which we're really grateful for. But we're raising additional money to do bigger projects. So right now we're extremely sustainable. So, you know, we're entirely supported by two salaries. And, you know, about 100,000, you know, you need about $100,000 a year to pay people, let's say. So you need several hundred thousand dollars a year to run a magazine like this, but you could probably do it for less. And so we have to raise that amount of money every year, at least, right? Like we need to support our salaries and we need to pay writers and editorial staff. And if you want to print books, that's a lot more. If you didn't do printing, I mean, you could do this for like 50k a year. Like if it was like you as a volunteer, and you wanted to pay writers to come write for you and kind of start your own magazine, you could probably do it for like 50k a year or pay less lower rates. I don't know. You know, like, for example, fiction pays significantly less. So a lot of fiction magazines pay like it's crazy. Like we pay almost the most in fiction. And I don't even think it's a lot. We pay like, I think a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars for a short story and most places pay like$200. It's crazy. So you can do a lot with a little. That's a long-winded answer. And then of course, in the future, we could, you know, we could, we've thought about running ads, but you asked about where we think our money comes from. Those are all firewalls. We started, when we started the magazine, we said we don't want, we don't want to write about companies, for-profit companies, unless there's like a really genuine reason. It's like we've never written about Asimov. We've never written about Dino or other companies that I think are really interesting. We've never written about our Zeta and protein design companies that I think are interesting. We just don't do it. And we also don't ask them for money because we don't want to even seem conflicted. And so the people we try to raise money from are our philanthropists, you know, just like individuals who might support our cause. And then also like nonprofits, like, you know, I guess if I was just naming names, not, I'm not saying necessarily we are raising money from them, but, you know, we're, we'd be interested in working with like in Astera or in Arc Institute or, you know, a convergent research or places like that. Yeah. We wanted to ask about something related to a collaboration with Homeworld Collective on a writing competition. And I remember there was this requirement for the stories to be positive, which I thought was really interesting because science fiction is often associated with dystopia. So I was curious what inspired that requirement and did it kind of have the expected impact on like submissions and kind of the stories that you got? Yeah, I think the reason was just exactly what you said, right? It's if you work in biology, you know, hopefully you think it's really cool and can do important things in the world. And so we just thought it was a shame that we didn't do it. It's a shame that so much is doom and gloom, especially with biology. And, you know, the thing that has always bothered me about the AI discussion is, you know, I'll be listening to people talk about AI and bio weapons come up almost every discussion. You know, it's like, it just seems very negative. A lot of the discussion of bio. So we wanted people to write positive things. I think the difficulty with that is that a lot of what we received is maybe a little bit cliche or like not super interesting, right? Like doom and gloom can be really, really interesting. And I think it is harder somewhat or at least different to write, you know, to have a plot that is centered in really like positive things. That writing competition was nonfiction and fiction. So it's easy to write positive nonfiction. I guess I'm really talking about like positive fiction, which is also something that we try to do at Asimov, at Asimov Press. But it's even hard for us, right? Like a lot of our pieces have elements of doom and gloom, even though maybe the overall message is positive. But yeah, that's it. It's like we want people to work on biology. You know, we think we can get more people to work on it if they see positive impacts that it's making. Yeah. I wonder, yeah, it seems like typical story arcs, you always need that conflict. And it seems like in a lot of science fiction, they put it in somewhere, they draw that conflict from some negative aspect of the science. And I wonder if there's a way to reframe that where you have some where the conflict is like the human part of the story and the positive science influence or the positive biotech is just the background. Well, you know, a while back I was talking to Jason Crawford who runs the Roots of Progress Institute. And I was telling him like, I said, I think it's harder to write positive science fiction because it's, you know, it's, it's harder to find plot devices, basically, like it's, you know, maybe one of the reasons people write so much negative sci fi is like, things taking over the world is just a really easy sort of trope. And he like very much disagreed that it's, that it's hard to write positive sci fi. And he said he was going to write a piece about it at some point, but I have not seen that at least if, if he has, but I'd be interested to read it. I agree with you. Like maybe the, you know, maybe one of the ways is like you said, personal conflict, like a hero struggle as a, you know, but the world that they exist in is positive. You know, maybe that's a solution, but I see a lot of the opposite, which is like a positive character development, but they exist in a dystopian world and they need to use some kind of technology to correct the dystopian world. So, but I guess there's different things, right? There's man versus man. There's man versus world. There's, and you can start to think about how to mix that up. I'm, I'm glad that I don't write sci fi. I think it's very difficult, but we do have some pieces coming up that I think play on that. Like there's one piece that we're about to publish that is very dystopian in a way, but could also be utopian to others. So it's like kind of walking a line about this world where people, you know, it's about brain uploading in a way it's about brain emulation and sort of joining like a hive mind or joining a community where you can fall more deeply in love than you've ever fallen before because you completely share each other's thoughts. And it's, so it's kind of a story about that. And to me that seems dystopian, but it's also utopian in other ways and not to give too many spoilers, but at the end there's like a schism and the character decides to return to his body while the other people go off and like sort of explore the universe and stuff, which is, you probably get the sense that it's a very grandiose piece, but yeah, he goes back into his own body and realizes that like he loves himself more than he's ever loved himself. Whereas before he did not appreciate the world that he was in. So that's kind of an interesting example. And then we, you know, Xander wrote this great piece. Hopefully it'll be published before this podcast goes live about an obituary writer living at a time when death has become a very rare occurrence. So it's like the last obit writer, which I just think is like a brilliant, I think it's like a great concept. And that again, it's like, it's technically a utopian world. Like, oh my gosh, people live forever. The only way to die is by some kind of freak accident, like a tree falls on someone. But it's also very sad in a way. And I think Xander pulls that out really, really well of like the loneliness of this existence in the monotony. So it's, yeah, I guess a lot of our upcoming pieces are not positive in the way that we initially envisioned. I think when we initially published the Asimov Press, like what we publish sort of thing, we said positive sci-fi, but a lot of our pieces are ending up sort of in this weird interstitial space. Yeah. So maybe along the lines of writing and communication, like you have done a lot of science communication now, and we're curious like what advice you would give to our audience to improve their own writing and storytelling. Well, yeah. So, you know, I guess a few things that I always tell people. The first is that you definitely don't need to be, you know, you don't need to go off and get a degree in writing. But in a sense, I guess it's the same as someone saying you don't need to go off and get a degree in science, to do science. Like, technically, that's true. You don't need a PhD to do biotech, let's say. But it certainly helps. Like, it'll help you get a better job. And I think that is still the case in writing. But not because the degree is necessarily teaching you things that you could not learn on your own. It's really like it gives you connections. It gives you, right, you become all of a sudden connected to very influential writers and professors and, you know, columnists at the New York Times. Like those people also teach at the good journalism schools. So like that was a big advantage for me of like going to New York University. The journalism program is excellent. There's writers, you know, Salman Rushdie is on the journalism staff at NYU. Like Salman Rushdie's office was like down the hall from the science journalism program. Like that's crazy, right? So there are advantages of going to journalism school. But all the things they teach you can be learned yourself just from writing. You can learn how to write a great pitch. That's actually my biggest piece of advice is like learn what how an essay should be or like, you know, what you need to convey to someone else to get them invested in your idea. Like so much of what I hear from scientists, like I said, is just big topics. Like I'm interested in protein design, or I'm interested in vaccines. And like the next step in your writing is really about narrowing your thought to say, here's why I'm interested in vaccines, or I'm interested in this very specific development of this new way of doing vaccines, right? That makes a piece more interesting. And it's good to start testing yourself like that of like, is this idea specific enough such that I could convey it in like a couple thousand words, ideally? That's one thing. You know, another thing is just writing a lot. But I think that's really hard, because writing just takes so long. And so a lot of scientists say that they want to write. I don't want this response to get long winded. But you know, one thing I'd say is like, a lot of scientists, they write something, and then they're disappointed that it wasn't received well. So like they invest all these hours, they publish a blog, and nobody reads it. And that's really frustrating. And you might say like, okay, I don't want to continue doing this, because nobody cared about it the first time that I published something. And like the truth, of course, is that it just takes a long time to build an audience who cares about your work. And so it's very frustrating to like, if your mental model of why you're writing is because you want to be more well known, or more influential, or whatever, like it is a long and disappointing road. So a lot of scientists say they want to write, but they don't end up doing it because it's just like, why bother? So if your motive is like, I want to write to think, like, you should just go do it. Like no one is stopping you, you should just start doing it and start sending your piece out to people. If you want your writing to be influential, and you want to make it public, I would encourage people not to start a blog, not to try to grow your own audience right away. I would start by writing for other outlets, like, you know, come pitch Asimov Press, and we'll link to your newsletter at the bottom. And like, we'll help you get a head start on audience and stuff like that. So that's really, I don't know, that's my advice, I guess, like, and also find a good editor or find someone who is like has a critical eye for structure. So not necessarily for content. I think it's, I think it's really simple for scientists to find a friend who knows the material. Like it's someone in your lab, it's someone close to you, right? Who knows the material that you're writing about. But it's really hard to find someone who knows structure, who knows, like, what is missing from the essay, structurally or conceptually. And that's something that editors are experts at. So like finding a friend that is a journalist or like a professional writer, not in your field, who really knows, like, how to write a compelling hook, a lead, a nut graph, how to write great transitions, etc. will be extremely valuable to you. And, you know, my anecdotal belief is that a lot of scientists starting blogs and stuff just don't do that. You know, they send the blog to other scientists, but they never think to send it like to a writer. Yeah. I think that's a great place for our listeners to listen to and think about how to engage. I guess since we're wrapping up, we'd like to ask, is there anything you'd like to share or promote with our audience, upcoming projects, articles, initiatives at Asimov Press? Well, book two is available for sale. Our second book is all about technology. So it's about the stories of how technologies were developed. And there's quite a lot of science fiction in this book related to future technologies, like an AI that designs its own chips by programming cells to extrude carbon nanotubes to print, you know, chips to train the next model of this AI. So, you know, lots of science fiction, lots of explainers on how biotechnologies came to be. So you can pick up a copy of that, or you can just go to press.asmov.com and subscribe and follow our work. Everything that we publish is free to read and we don't run advertisements. We don't collect money from you in any way. So that's another great way to support our work. Awesome. Well, we'll definitely be doing that as fans before and after the interview. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks so much, Nico. So this has been another episode of EBRC in Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or postdoc and you're interested in getting involved with the Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. Big thanks to the entire EBRC podcast team, Andrew Hunt, Ross Jones, David Mai, Heidi Klumpa, Rana Saeed, Will Grooby, Matt Williams, and Aishan Basit, Kiatasui. Thanks to EBRC for their support and to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.