Science Journalist - Author - Pulitzer Laureate
He looked at microbes, parasites, and a pandemic - and somehow made you fall in love with all of them.
Who Is Ed Yong
Ed Yong is the journalist who convinced millions of people to care about creatures they cannot see. Through eight years and over 750 stories at The Atlantic, he became the rare writer who could stand between science and the public and translate without losing anything in translation - not the wonder, not the complexity, not the stakes.
His method is deceptively simple: go wide, stay curious, and never stop asking what something looks like from inside the animal's skin - or inside the microbe's protein coat. That approach produced two New York Times bestsellers, a Pulitzer Prize for his COVID-19 pandemic coverage, and a body of work that has been cited in courtrooms, hospital waiting rooms, and presidential reading lists. Barack Obama put An Immense World on his 2022 Best Books list. Bill Gates put I Contain Multitudes on his. The Nobel laureates and the general public have been, for once, in agreement.
Born Edmund Soon-Weng Yong in Malaysia in 1981, he studied Zoology at Cambridge before an MPhil in Biochemistry at University College London confirmed what he already suspected: he was too curious to be a scientist. The laboratory's narrowing spotlight did not suit him. Journalism's wide aperture did. He launched the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science in 2007 and spent eight years proving that "science blogger" could be a legitimate career before anyone agreed it was.
He joined The Atlantic in 2015 and promptly redefined what a staff science writer does. By 2020, when a novel coronavirus reshaped every institution on earth, Yong was already at his desk. He wrote more than two dozen features on COVID-19 that year - on immunology, masking, vaccine hesitancy, Long COVID (which he was among the first to report on, in June 2020), and the psychological toll of living through a mass death event. The 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting recognized that coverage. The Poynter Institute called him "the most important and impactful journalist of 2020." He called it the worst year of his life.
He left The Atlantic in July 2023, having given everything the job asked for and having noticed what that cost. "I was doing my best work at severe cost to all of the other parts of myself," he said. The admission was characteristically honest, and it landed differently from the usual burnout discourse because this was a man who had just won the highest prize in his field while doing the work. The cost was real precisely because the work was real.
Now he writes independently, publishes the newsletter The Ed's Up, holds a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, and continues to find the hidden architecture of the world - from the electroreception of sharks to the magnetic compass of migratory birds - and make it feel immediate. His corgi is named Typo. The irony is not lost on him.
I don't have the capacity to narrow my attentional spotlight too far. I like to have broad scopes, to look at a wide variety of things, and I love constantly learning about new areas.- Ed Yong, on why he left science for journalism
Recognition
Bibliography
The book that turned the hidden world of microbiomes into a cultural phenomenon. Yong shows how bacteria, fungi, and viruses are not enemies of life but architects of it - shaping immune systems, behaviors, and the very possibility of complex animal existence. Corals, squid, beetles: all characters in a story that turns out to be about you.
Every animal lives inside its own sensory bubble - its Umwelt. Crocodiles whose scales are as sensitive as fingertips. Giant squid with eyes tuned to detect bioluminescent sperm whales. Bees that see ultraviolet patterns we cannot imagine. Yong's second book is an act of radical expansion: he gives readers a brief, vertiginous experience of all the worlds that coexist with ours, unseen.
COVID Coverage
When COVID-19 arrived, every publication scrambled. Yong had been covering biology for fifteen years. He wrote about immunology when it was unfashionable. He understood how viruses spread, how immune systems fail, how scientific uncertainty propagates through institutions. He was ready in a way that was almost unfair to everyone else.
His COVID coverage was not just rapid. It was ahead. He reported on Long COVID in June 2020 - months before the condition had a name, before most clinicians believed it was real. He wrote about the psychological toll of healthcare workers. He explained masking. He covered vaccine hesitancy without condescension. He tracked the evolving science without pretending the science wasn't evolving.
What made the coverage extraordinary was not the volume but the empathy. Yong described his process as "spending days listening to the worst moments of dozens of people's lives" - an act of witness that journalism requires and that most of us would find unbearable.
"When journalists do their job correctly, they extend empathy to their subjects. That means spending days listening to the worst moments of dozens of people's lives to convey their experiences to the world."
From An Immense World
The Umwelt - the perceptual universe of any given animal - is one of Yong's central obsessions. Here are five windows into the hidden realms he maps in his second book.
Sharks detect the faint electrical fields of prey hiding under sand. A field as weak as one billionth of a volt per centimeter triggers their hunting response.
Bees see ultraviolet patterns on flowers that guide them to nectar - landing strips invisible to human eyes. Every garden is a different place to them.
A crocodile's face bristles with tiny pressure-sensing bumps so sensitive that the scaly snout rivals a human fingertip in tactile acuity.
Migratory songbirds may perceive the Earth's magnetic field as a visual overlay - a kind of internal GPS that activates with the changing of seasons.
Giant squid evolved enormous eyes - the size of soccer balls - specifically to detect the bioluminescent glow of sperm whales approaching from below.
When used properly, comedy in science writing is crucial. If done badly, it's worse than not doing it at all. The secret is to almost not try.- Ed Yong, on humor in science journalism
Career Timeline
In His Own Words
When used properly, comedy in science writing is crucial. If done badly, it's worse than not doing it at all. The secret is to almost not try.
I don't have the capacity to narrow my attentional spotlight too far, which is why I wasn't a very good practicing scientist. I like to have broad scopes, to look at a wide variety of things.
I was doing my best work at severe cost to all of the other parts of myself.
Hope is a discipline - a practice that you cultivate through active effort. Not optimism. Not wishful thinking. Work.
The Person
During the pandemic he adopted a corgi named Typo. Watching the dog navigate the world by smell, sound, and touch directly fed the research and intuition behind An Immense World. A pandemic puppy became a philosophy tutor. The name Typo was a deliberate choice by a man who has spent his career making sure words are exactly right.
He first reported on Long COVID in June 2020, when most clinicians were still dismissing it. He went on to write eight substantial pieces about the condition - covering the disbelief patients faced, the emerging science of brain fog, and the politics of recognition. Months ahead of the medical establishment, he treated patient experience as data.
I Contain Multitudes appeared as a clue on Jeopardy! - which is the exact kind of cultural crossover that science writers dream about without expecting. The book was simultaneously on Bill Gates' and Mark Zuckerberg's reading lists, which is either an endorsement or a warning depending on your politics, but either way the microbes don't care.
His 2014 TED Talk on zombie-making parasites - specifically the fungus Ophiocordyceps that hijacks carpenter ants and forces them to climb before killing them - has been viewed 1.9 million times. The reason is simple: he tells the story the way a thriller writer would, then stops and says, "this is real."
Worth Knowing