Here are 30 great essays about biology. I consider these to be my "personal canon," and think that they are all basically perfect in their own ways, despite being different in form and style. All have shaped my own writing considerably. I'm not including links here, but you can easily search and find these. 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 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, Elizabeth Dzeng, 2014 5. A Future History of Biomedical Progress, Adam Green (Markov), 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 & 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, 1976 17. Lena, qntm, 2021 18. Sequences and Consequences, Sydney Brenner, 2010 19. The NIH Report, Matt Faherty, 2022 (I edited this one) 20. Simplicity in biology, Uri Alon, 2007 21. A breakthrough from 60 years ago: “General nature of the genetic code for proteins” (1961), Matthew Cobb, 2021 22. Molecular “Vitalism”, Marc Kirschner, John Gerhart, Tim Mitchison, 2000 23. The Coming Technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge, 1993 24. Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation, Brian Hanley & William Bains & 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 (Nintil), 2020 29. The Perfect Human is Puerto Rican, Lior Pachter, 2014 30. No Evidence of Disease, Stephanie Bourque, 2012