How to extract elements from list of lists

Another way is to use unlist:

> t1=list(list(c("a","control")),list(c("b","disease1")))
> t1
[[1]]
[[1]][[1]]
[1] "a"       "control"


[[2]]
[[2]][[1]]
[1] "b"        "disease1"

> matrix(unlist(t1),ncol=2,byrow=TRUE)
     [,1] [,2]      
[1,] "a"  "control" 
[2,] "b"  "disease1"

rapply offers yet another option:

unique(rapply(t1, function(x) head(x, 1)))