Biology Learning Cheat Sheet

I taught myself biology to understand the science of cell-based meat. These are my recommendations for how you can do the same.

To Start: Khan Academy Biology

• I’d recommend doing the everything through “Viruses”, skipping all the stuff about ecology and populations, but making sure to do “Plant Biology.” The course is long but will give a great foundational knowledge.

The transition from beginner material to advanced material (i.e. the actual stuff you care about) is challenging. You can try to start consuming general intermediate-level biology material, but I think you’ll learn a lot of unnecessary and uninteresting stuff this way, especially if you’re learning biology with a particular goal in mind. I think the best strategy is just to jump straight to the end. I’d recommend finding some academic papers about the subject you’re interested in, then reading them slowly, looking up every term you don’t know, (and every term you don’t know while researching the first term). The first papers will be very difficult and might each take weeks to finish, but gradually they will get easier and easier.

Intermediate resources: These aren’t sequential but are good resources to learn about particular concepts. I love videos for learning, but if you learn differently, these resources might not be the best.

• AK Lectures: the best resource by far. Lot’s of material and explained very well.

• Crash Course: not as much material as AK Lectures, but generally explained in a very accessible way.

• Bozeman Science: My last resort for videos. I find he’s decent, but not great at explaining things.

• Wikipedia and Google are invaluable!

For reading papers behind a paywall: Sci-hub