The golden age of vaccine development • The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

The book of discoveries • Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Ten favorites from 2025 • Some of the Works in Progress essays that I enjoyed the most this year.

The first cancer vaccine • Hepatitis B is a tiny virus that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths from liver disease and cancer each year. The vaccine against it became the first of many milestones.

Classical statues were not painted horribly • Did the Greeks and Romans have bad taste or have the reconstructors of classical statues been trolling us all this time?

English prose has become much easier to read • It's not because of shorter sentences

Why is South Korean fertility so low? • Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate.

Give Works in Progress as a gift • Order by Monday 15 December for delivery before Christmas in the US and UK

Why we still have mechanical watches • Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.

The holy grail of capitalism • A new measure may be the holy grail of economic regulation.

Nature's drug database • Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to use them.

The history of vaccines • The early smallpox vaccines that kept dying out, why Émile Roux drilled into rabbits' skulls, and the lucky career changes that saved millions of lives.

Why the West was downzoned • In the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?

Issue 21: The Great Downzoning • Plus: Why cities in poor countries need wider streets, how to measure competition, and the South Korean baby bust.

Should we ban ugly buildings? • Episode ten of the Works in Progress podcast is surprisingly NIMBY.

Living in artificial gravity • If we ever want to live in space, we need to work out a way of creating artificial gravity.

The three-thousand-year journey of colchicine • For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

Inventing the dishwasher • The amount of housework a married American woman did fell by 48 percent in 45 years. The dishwasher alone didn't cause this, but it certainly helped.

Why the developing world needs wider streets • Roads are the arteries of cities, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. Cities of the developing world need more of them.

More pieces we would like to commission • Write for us.

The economics of the baby bust with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde • Episode nine of the Works in Progress podcast.

Evolution under a microscope • Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

Readers from Canada, Australia and the EU can now subscribe to Works in Progress • Our first print edition ships in two weeks.

Will AI solve medicine? • Some say AI will solve medicine within a decade. Others believe biology is far more complex than people imagine and AI will hit the limits of clinical trials and economics. Who's right?

Treating cost disease with Congressman Jake Auchincloss • Episode eight of the Works in Progress podcast is about the politics of the Abundance movement

The genius of the amateur • The greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who can take a fresh perspective

The art of protein design with AI • Scientists are using AI to hallucinate novel proteins that could transform medicine, agriculture, and materials science

What makes Joel Mokyr great • His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas

Chinese dams hold billions of people to ransom • Could desalination make them irrelevant?

What's new in biology: October 2025 • Safer transplants, new antibiotics, the rise of paper mills, long-term flu protection, slowing down ageing, and more.

Hacking proteins with AI • Episode four of Hard Drugs is about building new proteins

Making antibodies as ubiquitous as aspirin • If antibodies were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

AI isn't replacing radiologists • Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.

Seeing the light • Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne diseases as rare as those carried by water.

Issue 20: The death rays that guard life • Plus: How to make antibodies, why rivers are now battlefields, and a clinical trial for cooling the plant

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