Back when I was in the lab, one of my favorite things was researching a new line of study we wanted to undertake which meant finding what had been published on the subject before, and then reading the papers those journal articles cited. I'd quickly go down the rabbit hole of reading hundreds of papers to become fully versed on the molecular pathways, research methods, current hypotheses, and proposed lines of inquiry to tease out the answers to the questions that the published results had created. To me it was not only the record of knowledge gained, but the testament to human ingenuity, curiosity, and potential. It was, in a word, beautiful.
On 1 January 2018, Rissland set herself the task of reading one paper per day, every day, as “a bit of a lark”.
“I thought, ‘Let’s see how long I can keep this up’, but within a month I was hooked,” she says. “I loved the exercise of learning something new every day and seeing how that opened up ideas in my own research.”
“As of today, I have read 899 papers in 899 days,” she tweeted. “I never would have imagined 2.5 years ago how much I would learn through this and how this would make me a better scientist and human."
“Most of the time it’s the nicest part of my day because I’m actually being a scientist, reading other people’s beautiful research,” she says. “I usually come away feeling really inspired and full of ideas.”
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
