Martine Rothblatt: Fortunately, Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. — I know where you know where it is on Michigan Avenue — my daughter was there week after week after week, and I was there with her. And they had a great — a great — library. They have things like card catalogues and reader’s guides that fortunately, us being kids of the ‘60s, we knew what they were.
So I was able to use those tools, read the books, read the journal articles. I read a journal article, I wouldn’t understand it, so I go to the dictionary. Look up the words I didn’t understand, I’d go back to the journal articles. I’d find like a high school biology book then a college anatomy book. I just kept going back and forth until I could understand.
I think what I can do is I can pick out the important parts of descriptions of knowledge much more efficiently than most people can. I can separate the wheat from the chaff. Like, if there’s a peer-reviewed journal article, most people will try to read the whole article, okay. That will take a long time. They may fall asleep doing it. They may get a headache from doing it.
I can look at this whole article and say, you know, these three paragraphs out of maybe like 100 or 200 paragraphs have the meat of the article. So I’ll digest those three paragraphs and then I’ll look in the references at the back of the article and I’ll go pull every article that that article referenced. And they do that until I’ve reached like a point of diminishing returns where I’ve digested everything on the field.