Do you know what part stood out the most to me? His difficulty getting access to scientific papers: > Graduate school wasn’t much better. Medzhitov arrived at

Do you know what part stood out the most to me? His difficulty getting access to scientific papers: > Graduate school wasn’t much better. Medzhitov arrived at Moscow State University just as the Soviet regime collapsed. The university was broke, and Medzhitov didn’t have the equipment he needed to run experiments. “I was basically spending all of my time reading and thinking,” Medzhitov told me. > Mostly, he thought about how our bodies perceive the outside world. We can recognise patterns of photons with our eyes and patterns of air vibrations with our ears. To Medzhitov, the immune system was another pattern recognition system – one that detected molecular signatures instead of light or sound. > As Medzhitov searched for papers on this subject, he came across references to a 1989 essay written by Charles Janeway, an immunologist at Yale, titled ‘Approaching the Asymptote? Evolution and revolution in immunology’. Medzhitov was intrigued and used several months’ of his stipend to buy a reprint of the paper. It was worth the wait, because the paper exposed him to Janeway’s theories, and those theories would change his life. Several months of stipend to buy a single paper?