The Library
Landmark papers, decoded
Example breakdowns of influential research — each one graded for how much to trust it, in plain English. Want a specific paper? Run it yourself.
Case-control study70
The 1950 study that first tied smoking to lung cancer
Two British researchers interviewed hundreds of lung-cancer patients and found almost all of them were smokers — one of the first hard signals that cigarettes were deadly.
Doll & Hill (1950)
Theoretical model (structural proposal)76
The one-page paper that revealed the shape of life
In barely a page, two scientists proposed that DNA is a twisted ladder of two strands — and quietly noted this shape could explain how life copies itself.
Watson & Crick (1953)
Theoretical model66
The formula that built modern finance — and a few crashes
Two economists derived a formula for the 'fair' price of a stock option — a piece of math so useful it launched the modern trillion-dollar derivatives industry.
Black & Scholes (1973)