Back in 2013, Scott Alexander wrote in Extreme mnemonics:

JS-154 is one of five metabolic products of netamine; however, the enzyme that produces it is unknown. It is manufactured in cells in the far rostral region of of the cerebrum, but after binding with a leukocynoid it takes a role in maintaining the blood-brain barrier – in particular guiding the movements of lipid molecules.
I find I can read paragraphs like this five or six times, write them on flashcards, enter them into Anki, and my brain still refuses to understand or remember them after weeks of trying.
On the other hand, my brain easily remembers vastly more complicated structures when they’re loaded with human-accessible meaning. For example, just by casually reading the Game of Thrones series, I know an extremely intricate web of genealogies, alliances, locations, journeys, battlesites, et cetera. Byte for byte, an average Game of Thrones reader/viewer probably has as much Game of Thrones information as a neuroscience Ph.D has molecular biology information, but getting the neuroscience info is still a thousand times harder.
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This makes me wonder if it would be possible to produce a story as enjoyable as Game of Thrones which was actually isomorphic to the most important pathways in molecular biology.

It's 2026 and we now have LLMs and image generation models. Is the mnemonic worldbuilding project of this scale now remotely feasible?

Here's my attempt at the first piece of it: the characters.

What molecules should we map to the characters?

There already exist works of fiction that map human cell types to memorable characters.

Osmosis Jones asks: what if each cell was a cartoon character?

Cells at Work asks: what if each cell was an anime character?

Cells at Work Code Black asks: what if each cell was desperately fighting for survival in the body of an aging impotent smoker?

I found these worlds delightful and I do recommend them for students just getting into physiology.

However, the deeper I got into molecular biology, the more I started to find this "1 cell = 1 character" mapping mnemonically futile.

From single-cell sequencing experiments, we know that cell types are not rigid essentialist bins, but are more like attractors in the analog gene expression space. Individual cells routinely change their type-cluster membership during regular development and regeneration. A given cell could have one "type"...

Jérémy Cochoy

Jérémy Cochoy