When I first started reading academic papers when I was 12 or 13, I wondered who the hell Ibid was. Seemed a very smart person.

Then I quickly figured it out. But at first (mainly because I didn’t care about it or think about it very hard since I cared about the content*), I thought Ibid must’ve been some huge polymath.

My memories aren’t 100% clear, but I think the first scientific paper I read was a paper by Kary Mullis (et al.) on the Polymerase Chain Reaction. I’d helped my neighbor pass her college microbiology and other science classes when I was 9 and 10, so I already had some background in the area.

Still, it was the hardest thing I’d ever read. I remember struggling with it a bit. No way to Google back then. Unfamiliar words had to be searched out in dictionaries that often didn’t contain them at all. No adult where I grew up knew more than I did, so there was no one to ask.

I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.

*To this day, I sometimes literally don’t know the title or the authors of books I’m reading — while I’m reading them.