Novels, films, plays and TV programs in the Lab Lit fiction genre

Editor's note: This list will be a continual work-in-progress – we would like it to be comprehensive. If you think we’ve missed something, nominate your favorite work here. Please note that 'lab lit' is not 'science fiction’; briefly, lab lit fiction depicts realistic scientists as central characters and portrays fairly realistic scientific practice or concepts, typically taking place in a realistic – as opposed to speculative or future – world. The action does not have to take place in a laboratory per se, just anywhere where scientists are doing what they do, such as a field station. Although some science fiction does indeed have elements of ‘lab lit’, and the boundaries can be fuzzy, this list is meant to feature real scientists in the real world. Those that deviate slightly from this definition, or are cross-over works, are annotated as such. In the interest of promoting scientists in fiction, this list also includes novels in which the scientist character(s) are not wholly central ('lab lit lite'). Very soon, we will be featuring more high-quality self-published lab lit novels as well.

Read about our experiment to boost the lab lit genre in Nature (download for free here).

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Novels

Paper

by John McCabe
Black comedy/thriller: A disgruntled biochemist is threatened by boredom, boss and vial of phenol

Carbon Dreams

by Susan M. Gaines
Drama: A female geologist struggles with career and love in California

Arrowsmith

by Sinclair Lewis
Drama: A scientist/medic leans the hard way that pure research is more noble – and cures plague in the process

Mendel's Dwarf

by Simon Mawer
Black comedy: A megalomaniac achondroplasiac geneticist studies his own disease

Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd
Drama/Thriller: Mathematics meets malign chimps – Jane Goodall with a twist

Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers
Drama: Love, music, art, literature, DNA coding and computers in one heady intellectual mix

Galatea 2.2

by Richard Powers
Drama: In this haunting story, a writer-in-residence recovers from personal tragedy by helping colorful, well-drawn neurologists build a sentient AI program

As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem
Drama: A particle physicist falls in love with a black hole of her own creation

Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson
Comedy/thriller: A fun-loving ecoterrorist chemist stumbles onto something more alarming than the usual toxic sludge in Boston Harbor

The Boric Acid Murder

by Camille Minichino
Mystery: A retired physicist gets caught up in a library murder

Passage

by Connie Willis
Drama: Near-death experiences under the microscope – is Heaven the Titanic? A scientist attempts to work out the brain physiology behind that long glowing tunnel...

Bellwether

by Connie Willis
Humor: The queen of science fiction sets her favorite genre aside to pen an entirely mainstream tale; capers, chaos theory and a flock of sheep feature in this rom-com set in a research institute

Triplet Code

by B. B. Jordan
Mystery: A scientist can't help noticing when her colleagues start dropping dead

Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson
Drama: Physicists becoming One with each other and the universe

Periodic Table

by Primo Levi
Semi-autobiographical fiction: A chemist survives Auschwitz

Cantor's Dilemma

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: What would you do to win a Nobel?

The Bourbaki Gambit

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: A secret group of researchers make a key discovery: their egos don't like being buried

Menachem's Seed

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Sperm-snatching on the academic conference circuit

NO

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: Scientists study penile erection and things get a bit personal

The Struggles of Albert Woods

by William Cooper
Humor: One minor scientist's battle to become not-quite-so-minor

Pharmacology Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: A graduate student goes undercover

Biotechnology Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: Wyle's intrepid hero is back, this time sniffing out dodgy dealings in cancer biotech

Medical School Is Murder

by Dirk Wyle
Mystery: More action, this time when the hero inherits a lab from a dead man

Thinks

by David Lodge
Humor: The Humanities vs. the Arts: a cognitive scientist and a novelist attempt to speak the same language

Einstein's Dreams

by Alan Lightman
Drama: A poetical, fictionalized account of Einstein's discovery process, most of which happens while he is asleep

Long For This World

by Michael Byers
Drama: A geneticist medic discovers a mutation in his patients that could lead to an ethically dubious cure for aging

Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell
Mystery: Virigina Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta on the trail of a serial killer, with a hefty dose of forensic science (and many others in this series)

Seaside Pleasures

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A tale of shells and snails, science and religion, love and death

Figure in a Landscape

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A seal zoologist clashes with a guilt-ridden recluse

Floating Stones

by Ann Lingard
Drama: A geologist toys with the irrational as he considers leaving family and career for a potter he meets while doing fieldwork

Strong Medicine

by Arthur Hailey
Thriller: A women discovers the sins and secrets of the pharmaceutical industry

Inspired Sleep

by Robert Cohen
Drama: A disgrunted PhD student tries to find solace in the dreams of a sleep research project

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

by Apostolos Doxiadis
Humor/Drama: The black sheep of a family struggles to solve an age-old mathematical theorem

Cloud Chamber

by Clare George
Historical drama: A tale of nuclear physicists at the dawn of atomic science

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon
Drama: In considering an experimental new cure, a bioinformaticist must choose between love and the autism that facilitates his talents

Die Vermessung der Welt (The Measurement of the World)

by Daniel Kehlmann
Historical drama: A fictionalized account of an intense meeting between mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and natural scientist Alexander von Humbold in Berlin in 1828 (in German)

Properties of Light

by Rebecca Goldstein
Drama: Burning love and murderous professional envy consume three physicists obsessed with understanding the quantum physics underpinning light

The Leaky Establishment

by David Langford
Humor: A caustic and humorous send-up of the nuclear research industry in Britain written by a former weapons physicist

Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson
Drama: An invertebrate zoologist returns home after many years of estrangement from her family

Quite a Year for Plums

by Bailey White
Drama: A plant pathologist learns how science should be used to understand nature rather than to conquer and master it

Prodigal Summer

by Barbara Kingsolver
Drama: A lone wildlife biologist lives in the woods and studies coyotes while attempting to sort out her personal life

This Thing of Darkness

by Harry Thompson
Historical Fiction: Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle viewed through the eyes of Captain Fitzroy

The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton
Historical Fiction: Darwin again, this time seen through the eyes of two modern-day, lovelorn scholars – Possession for the evolutionarily minded

Intuition

by Allegra Goodman
Drama: Secrets, lies and scientific fraud threaten to tear apart a close-knit cancer laboratory

Enigma

by Robert Harris
Historical fiction: A brilliant mathematician struggles to crack German codes in the second world war

Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson
Historical fiction: Alan Turing as a troubled mathematical soul in this brilliant blend of fact and fancy

A Whistling Woman

by A.S. Byatt
Drama: Snail scientists almost completely diluted by an exhaustive cast of characters in this 'novel of ideas' (preceded by three other books in a series)

A Whiff of Death

by Isaac Asimov
Mystery: Petty politics and murder in this still-timely 1958 tale of an assistant professor in a chemistry department, penned when Azimov was a chemistry professor himself

The Scorpion's Tail

by Sylvia Torti
Drama: Written by a biology PhD and set in Chiapas during the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, this novel features two field ecologists who get caught up in something they never expected

Wegener's Jigsaw (One Day On the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead)

by Clare Dudman
Historical fiction: A fictionalized autobiography of the scientific revolutionary Alfred Wegener, the main proponent of continental drift

98 Reasons For Being

by Clare Dudman
Historical fiction: A biographical novel about another scientific revolutionary, the experimental psychiatrist Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann

Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Thriller: A rich scientific, political and cultural environment and dangerous ecoterrorists feature in this exciting tale

Forty Signs of Rain

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: Scientists and policy wonks struggle to cope with the impending threat of global warming - with great insights into the culture of scientific funding (first of trilogy entitled 'Science in the Capitol')

Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: The trilogy continues as the Gulf Stream stalls and a mini-Ice Age descends on D.C. - genetically engineered lichen to the rescue? (Part 2 of trilogy)

Sixty Days and Counting

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: An eco-friendly president is elected, but will it be too late? (part 3 of trilogy)

The Search

by C. P. Snow
Drama: From the scientist father of 'the two cultures' idea, an x-ray crystallographer participates in a few scientific cover-ups

The Small Back Room

by Nigel Balchin
Drama: Classic lab lit from the 1940s about wartime boffins, by someone who was there

Talk Nerdy to Me

by Vicki Lewis Thompson
Humor: An electrical engineer hero and a sexy, brainy heroine build a working bio-fuelled hovercraft in her garage (part of 'The Nerd Series')

Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes
Drama: A brilliant, creative organic chemist tries to manage a complicated life without descending into madness while developing her breakthrough theory

Cannery Row

by John Steinbeck
Humor: A marine biologist presides over a bohemian field station with a colorful cast of whores, gamblers, bums, drunks and artists (based loosely on the life of Ed Ricketts)

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

by Janna Levin
Historical Fiction: A poetic account of the lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, just on the border between fiction and non-fiction

Life

by Gwyneth Jones
Drama: A young geneticist makes her way through her life as a scientist, wife and mother.

Lust

by Geoff Ryman
Black Comedy: A thirty-something government scientist with an overactive imagination grapples with his urges

Radiance

by Carter Scholz
Drama: Young physicists become drawn into weapons work at the Lawrence Livermore lab

Luminous Fish

by Lynn Margulis
Drama: A tale of atmospheric scientists from the founder of the endosymbiosis theory, via an ultimately unsatisfying symbiosis of fiction and autobiography

The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Martinez
Drama: A math graduate student and a logician try to find out who killed an old woman who was involved in Enigma

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday
Comedy/Drama: A fisheries scientist struggles to create a salmon habitat in the desert

The Gift

by Jon Kalb
Drama: Greed and sabotage in the hominid fossil-hunting world, written by an archaeologist who should know

Lethal Genes

by Linda Grant
Mystery: Death and subterfuge in a Bay Area plant genetics lab

Cold Dark Matter

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A suicide in a remote astronomical observatory opens up an even older, Cold War era mystery

Dead Water Creek

by Alex Brett
Mystery: A researcher blows the whistle on a lab head siphoning off funds in a fisheries laboratory, but there's more to the crime than meets the eye

A Hole in Texas

by Herman Wouk
Drama/Romance: An aging particle physicist runs afoul with Congress, the Chinese and the CIA in his quest for the Higgs Bosun

Kepler

by John Banville
Historical fiction: The more human side of the famous astronomer is brought to life

Final Theory

by Mark Alpert
Thriller: Terrorists and the FBI battle it out over Einstein's 'lost' unification theory

Sun and Moon Corrupted

by Philip Ball
Drama: A troubled journalist goes on the trail of a mysterious fringe scientist

Crossover Novels (science fiction with particularly realistic scientists)

Blood Music

by Greg Bear
Thriller: Genetically engineered cells take over (admittedly in an over-the-top way, but the lab scenes are extremely realistic, hence the book's inclusion here)

Jurassic Park

by Michael Crichton
Thriller: Ancient dinosaur DNA wreaks more havoc (also surprisingly plausibly; one could argue that dinosaurs could be cloned as Crichton describes, and the scientists are believable too)

Timescape

by Gregory Benford
Drama: A Californian scientist in the 60's find signatures of tachyons in a spin resonance experiment which turn out to comprise an urgent subatomic message

Cosm

by Gregory Benford
Drama: Amidst academic intrigue, a high-energy physicist creates an unusual object which she suspects could be a pocket universe

Twistor

by John Cramer
Drama: A physics postdoc and graduate student access a portal to the dark-matter universe

The Secret

by Eva Hoffman
Drama: A futuristic account of a cloned young woman which contains a substantial amount of credible detail by a non-scientist who has done her homework

Survival

by Julie E. Czerneda
Drama: A biologist studying salmon gets captured by alien archeologists for her unique perspectives on migration, featuring startling accurate field biology culture (first part of a series, 'Species Imperative')

His Master's Voice

by Stanislaw Lem
Drama: A large team of scientists try to decode a message from space, featuring a great depiction of how scientific collaborations work

The Swarm

by Frank Schatzing
Drama: Deep-sea intelligent life seeks revenge on man's careless environmental ways, with realistic scientist characters (and a cameo by a real one)

Red Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: People arrive on Mars and debate the ethics of terraforming, featuring realistically drawn science and scientists (Part 1 of a trilogy)

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: The scientist settlers, now technically traitors, rebel against Earth (Part 2 of a trilogy)

Blue Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: Mars looks beyond Earth to the future (Part 3 of a trilogy)

The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson
Drama: A near-future California becomes obsessed with technology and divided by a battle between weapons manufacturers and terrorists

Films

Creator

(Dir. Ivan Passer)
Romantic Comedy: A grieving scientist (Peter O'Toole) tries to clone his late wife; the most realistic molecular biology labs on film, in our opinion

Outbreak

(Dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
Thriller: A military softie (Dustin Hoffman), a scientist (Rene Russo), a monkey and a brilliant supporting cast save the free world from viral catastrophe

Contact

(Dir. Robert Zemeckis)
Thriller: An astronomer (Jodie Foster) risks her career by devoting herself to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence

Dante's Peak

(Dir. Roger Donaldson)
Thriller: Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) tries to convince a city council that the local mountain is about to blow, with realistic science as well as scientists

Deep Impact

(Dir. Mimi Leder)
Thriller: Amateur and professional astronomers feature in this realistically realized tale of a comet on a collision course with Earth, starring Robert Duvall

I Am Legend

(Dir. Francis Lawrence)
Thriller: One scientist (Will Smith) must find a cure for a gene therapy cure gone horribly wrong

Plays

Blinded by the Sun

by Stephen Poliakoff
Drama: Scientists squabble as cold fusion goes belly-up

Copenhagen

by Michael Frayn
Historical drama: Mr. and Mrs. Niels Bohr reminisce with Werner Heisenberg over the uncertainty of memory and quantum mechanics

Les Palmes de M. Schutz

by Jean-Noël Fenwick
Drama/Comedy: Marie and Pierre Curie discover something hot

An Immaculate Misconception

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: A broody scientist finally gets her gloved hands on some sperm

Oxygen

by Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffman
Drama: Scientists both past and present bicker about who discovered the humble gas

Calculus

by Carl Djerassi
Drama: More bickering (this time about mathematics and the dark side of Isaac Newton)

Phallacy

by Carl Djerassi
Drama/Comedy: Art vs. science as a bronze statue catalyzes love and a museum spat

Autodestruct: the ultimate cure for cancer

by Lizzie Burns
Drama: A man lives on through an immortal cell culture of himself

Safe Delivery

by Tom McGrath and Julie Webb
Drama: A story about gene therapy, lab politics and life

Arcadia

by Tom Stoppard
Comedy: Two cultures collide in this classic tale of order, chaos and landscape gardening

Galileo (Life of Galileo)

by Bertolt Brecht
Historical fiction: The Church battles it out against rationality in this insight-packed masterpiece

A Disappearing Number

by Simon Burney and Complicite
Historical fiction: A time-bending fantasy account based on the real life of the genius mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan

TV Programs

Numbers

USA TV series from CBS
Thriller: An FBI agent recruits his mathematical genius brother to help solve crimes

CSI (Crime Scene Investigation)

USA TV series from CBS
Thriller: Forensics detectives with refreshingly realistic scenes from labs, featuring scientists who talk (mostly) like real scientists!

Supernova

British series from the BBC
Comedy: An astonomer flees the weirdness of Britain for an even weirder experience at an observatory in the Australian outback

Eleventh Hour

British series from ITV (Stephen Gallagher)
Drama: A physicist (played by Patrick Stewart) helps the government deal with various scientific crises including a renegade human cloner and a secret uranium factory

ReGenesis

Canadian series from The Movie Network/Movie Central/Shaftsbury Films
Thriller: A crack team of scientists polices the shadowy dealings of the world's biotech and big pharma