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Section 04 of 09 12 essays · Spring 2026

Biology.

Cells, evolution, ecology, and biotechnology.

Section editor
Mateo Reyes
Life keeps doing improbable things on long enough timescales. We follow cells, ecosystems, and the people doggedly watching them.
More in Biology
02
May 26, 2026 · 8 min read

The Song of the Cell: Mukherjee's Tour of the Cellular Body

Siddhartha Mukherjee's 2022 book walks through the cell types of the human body chapter by chapter — from Hooke's cork to CAR-T immunothera…

03
May 25, 2026 · 6 min read

Glucose and Glutamine: The Two Fuels Every Cancer Depends On

No matter how genetically different cancers are, they all depend on exactly two fuels: glucose and glutamine. The press-pulse strategy expl…

04
May 25, 2026 · 5 min read

The Nuclear Transfer Experiments: The Proof Was in the Cytoplasm

What happens when you move a tumor nucleus into a healthy cell — and a healthy nucleus into cancer cytoplasm? Researchers did exactly this.…

05
May 25, 2026 · 5 min read

The Warburg Effect: Why Cancer Cells Abandon Normal Energy Production

Normal cells extract 36 ATP from one glucose molecule. Cancer cells extract 2 — then dump lactic acid as waste, even when oxygen is availab…

06
May 25, 2026 · 4 min read

Cancer Is Not What You Think: The Genetic Theory Has a Problem

For fifty years we have blamed cancer on broken genes. But the genome data revealed chaos — thousands of different mutations in every tumor…

07
May 29, 2026 · 8 min read

From Single Cell to Edited Genome: Ramakrishnan on Fertilization and the Future of Heritable DNA

How a sperm and an egg fuse into one cell that carries a full human being inside it, and what the new genome-editing tools could do to that…

08
May 26, 2026 · 6 min read

Is the Brain and the Mind the Same Thing?

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explores one of science's deepest questions: the brain is a measurable physical organ, but the mind — the red…

09
May 17, 2026 · 2 min read

Cancer Is a Metabolic Disease: How the Ketogenic Diet Starves Cancer

Dr. Thomas Seyfried's 30 years of research show that cancer is not a genetic disease but a mitochondrial metabolic disease — and that the k…

010
May 25, 2026 · 9 min read

Cancer Immunotherapy: How the Body Learned to Fight Back

Checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T cells, and the long story of teaching the immune system to see what cancer made invisible.

011
May 17, 2026 · 6 min read

Why Sugar Feeds Cancer — And What to Do About It

Cancer cells are locked into burning glucose — they cannot use ketones or fat. Based on Dr. Thomas Seyfried's research, here is the science…

012
May 25, 2026 · 6 min read

Stem Cells: How They Arise and the Technologies That Harness Them

Siddhartha Mukherjee explains how stem cells originate in every tissue, why their numbers decline with age, and how CRISPR editing, CAR-T t…

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