Ten years ago, a reader curious about biotechnology looked up CRISPR. Today the same reader is more likely to look up semaglutide.

We counted English Wikipedia page views for five biotechnology topics, year by year. Page views are a rough measure of public attention, and they have a different shape from the research and funding numbers elsewhere in this series.

What do people look up?

1. 12022: Semaglutide overtakes CRISPR

SemaglutideCRISPRmRNA vaccineBioinformaticsAlphaFold

Source: Wikimedia Foundation, Pageviews API (en.wikipedia, all access, user agents). Sums of monthly views. mRNA vaccine and AlphaFold series start in 2020, when their pages began to receive significant traffic.

View data

year	sema	crispr	bio
2016	5742	1614966	441014
2017	33383	1768241	489758
2018	73701	1529047	478860
2019	113005	1182583	413506
2020	149448	1079243	357273
2021	496639	943986	324820
2022	774272	587701	303152
2023	1883251	500467	274586
2024	2711799	451000	253803
2025	1485974	389713	136910

Three things stand out.

Semaglutide is the biggest story by far. Views rose from 6,000 in 2016 to 774,000 in 2022, passing CRISPR that year, then to 1.88 million in 2023 and 2.71 million in 2024. In 2024 it received about six times the views of CRISPR. In 2025 it fell back to 1.49 million, still 3.8 times CRISPR.

CRISPR peaked early. Its views were highest in 2017 (1.77 million) and have fallen every year since, to 390,000 in 2025. The 2020 Nobel Prize and the 2023 approval of the first CRISPR therapy did not bring attention back to the 2017 level.

mRNA vaccine had one big year. Views went from 19,000 in 2020 to 470,000 in 2021, then declined to 177,000 by 2025. AlphaFold's attention has been smaller and steadier, rising from 35,000 in 2020 to a high of 237,000 in 2024.

What does this tell us?

Attention went to the thing people could take. A weight-loss drug that millions of people use drew far more curiosity than a laboratory technique or a data-analysis field. This lines up with the market data: Lilly's Mounjaro revenue outside the US now exceeds its US revenue, and people are looking it up.

It also shows how little visibility a field gets from technical importance alone. Bioinformatics views fell from 490,000 in 2017 to 137,000 in 2025, while GenBank grew 29-fold between 2018 and 2026 (see our genome cost analysis). The two are not in conflict. Infrastructure is rarely something the public searches for.

Limits

This is the most easily misread chart in the series, so we list the limits in detail.

• Wikipedia is not the public. It reflects people who read English Wikipedia, and it does not capture news, social media or search results.
• Traffic is falling almost everywhere. Most of the series fell in 2025, including ones that had been growing. The decline for bioinformatics (46% in 2025) is larger than for CRISPR (14%). We suspect part of the fall is a general decline in Wikipedia traffic, for example because readers get answers elsewhere, but we did not measure that, so treat declines with caution.
• Page views count visits, not intent. A spike can come from news, a school assignment or a bot that evades filtering.
• We chose the topics. Five articles are not the bioeconomy. A different set would give a different picture.
• The data source changed. An earlier version of this post used Google Trends data. This version uses an open dataset that anyone can re-run.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Foundation, Pageviews API: monthly views per article for Semaglutide, CRISPR, Bioinformatics, MRNA vaccine and AlphaFold on en.wikipedia.org, summed by calendar year; retrieved October 4, 2026.