Best Pandemic and Bioengineering Books: 24 CEO Picks

John M. Barry follows the 1918 flu from Haskell County, Kansas, through army camps and wartime troop movements, and explains how the virus replicated and why medicine of the day struggled to stop it. Ryan Holiday stresses how unprepared cities were as millions died.

William H. Foege describes the vaccination strategy he helped shape to eradicate smallpox, finally contained in India, mixing memoir with everyday fieldwork in very poor countries. Bill Gates says it shows that campaign as seen from the front lines.

Physician Paul Farmer draws on work against AIDS in Haiti and drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru to argue that modern epidemics hit the poor hardest and that blaming patients hides the forces deciding who falls ill. Bill Gates says it reveals the health gap between rich and poor.

Journalist Sonia Shah traces malaria across half a million years, from the genetic defenses humans evolved and its part in Rome’s decline to quinine, DDT and artemisinin, with reporting from places where it is endemic. Bill Gates calls it probably the best single book on the disease.

Historian William H. McNeill treats epidemics as social as well as biological events, from the Athenian plague and smallpox in Aztec Mexico to bubonic plague in China, and he expected a changed flu virus to cause the next pandemic. Patrick Collison recommends it.

Richard Preston reconstructs the Ebola epidemic of 2013 and 2014 through the doctors, nurses and scientists who fought it, including the dispute over who should receive scarce experimental treatment. Kwame Anthony Appiah says it lays bare the weakness of public health systems around the world.

J. Craig Venter, known for sequencing the human genome, recounts how his team built the first synthetic lifeform, announced in 2010, and considers what synthetic genomics could mean for human life and for the old question of what life is. Naveen Jain recommends it.

Jennifer A. Doudna, who helped create the CRISPR gene editing tool, tells the story of its discovery with Samuel H. Sternberg and weighs its promise against HIV, genetic disease and cancer against the risks of editing human embryos. Marvin Liao has it on his reading list.

Physician and sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis examines how the coronavirus pandemic changed American life and what recovery may follow, using epidemiology, history and sociology to set a deadly germ against the social nature of humans. Paul Graham calls it a rare blend of historical panorama and topical bestseller.

George M. Church, a Harvard biologist, and Ed Regis explain synthetic biology, where genomes are rewritten to yield new drugs, vaccines and biofuels or even revive woolly mammoths, and weigh its dangers against its gains. Marvin Liao has it on his reading list.

Steven Johnson recounts the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London, where physician John Snow mapped the cases to one water pump, and connects disease, city growth and scientific inquiry. Alison Alvarez says traces of that map appear in her company’s customer discovery tools.

Jared Diamond explains why Eurasian societies came to conquer others through geography, farming and domestic animals, a history of civilizations in which resistance to epidemic disease is one of the advantages that farming and dense populations brought. Charlie Munger read it twice, which he says he seldom does.

Matt Ridley tells the human story one chromosome at a time, using genes linked to Huntington’s disease, asthma and language to open wider themes, a primer on reading the genome rather than engineering it. Charlie Munger calls it a fabulous book full of striking figures.

Matt Richtel explains the immune system through four patients, including an HIV patient seen as a medical marvel, and traces the science from the Black Plague through vaccines and antibiotics to immunotherapy. Bill Gates calls their stories a very interesting look at immunity.

Jeremy N. Smith profiles the doctor and economist behind the Global Burden of Disease studies, which measure what makes people sick and what kills them, a book about measuring health rather than about epidemics. Bill Gates calls it a readable account of why that work matters.

Ed Yong argues that the microbes living in every animal are partners more than germs, shaping immune systems, digestion and organs, a book mainly about the microbiome rather than disease that still changes how germs are seen. Bill Gates praises its realistic optimism about microbiome research.

Essayist Eula Biss, a new mother, examines the fears and myths around vaccines and immunity and what they mean for one child, a community and a country, mixing conversations with other mothers and literary reading. Bill Gates says she uses philosophy and science to answer rumors about childhood vaccines.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s history of genetics runs from a monk’s experiments in a Moravian abbey to current work on reading and writing human DNA, mainly a story of heredity that also warns where eugenics led. Bill Gates says Mukherjee wrote it for lay readers because genome technology will soon touch everyone.

Michael Crichton’s novel imagines a bioengineering firm that recreates dinosaurs from ancient DNA preserved in amber for an island theme park, then brings in scientists to inspect it, a fictional warning against reckless genetic engineering. Richard Branson has it on his list of books for a lifetime.

Tracy Kidder’s biography of a physician and infectious disease specialist follows his clinic in Cange, Haiti, and a campaign against drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru, mainly a portrait of one doctor rather than a study of epidemics. Richard Branson has it on his lifetime reading list.

Mainly a central banking history, Nick Timiraos’s inside account shows how Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve stopped the pandemic job losses of millions of Americans from turning into economic ruin. Bill Ackman calls it an inside look at how central bank decisions get made.

Albert Camus’s novel opens in 1940s Oran as rats die en masse and the physician Bernard Rieux concludes that a plague is spreading while the authorities hesitate, until the whole city is sealed under quarantine. Lex Fridman says it is probably his favorite Camus book now.

Biologist Nessa Carey explains epigenetics, the way cells read identical DNA differently, and what it means for aging, disease and addiction, mainly a genetics primer that shows how biology has moved past the idea of a fixed code. Naveen Jain says he loves it.

Jose Saramago’s novel begins when an unexplained epidemic of blindness strikes an unnamed city and the authorities confine the first victims, an eye doctor among them, in an empty mental hospital. Leah Lizarondo found its dystopia provocative and its look at human fallibility lasting.