Foundational Skills in Life Sciences
Students and scholars in life sciences need to use many skills to survive and excel during scientific training, which involves listening, reading, writing, and speaking.
But I have seen many of them struggle in understanding and learning those skills.
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I will assist you through the skills, so that you will learn and improve successfully in your professional life.
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Foundational Skills in Life Sciences
57. How to read the main points of Introduction paragraphs
The Introduction section of a life-science paper tells the main story, sometimes even multiple related ones. But without helpful subheadings, understanding its core points can be challenging. Then, how do we effectively read Introduction paragraphs to understand the section?
We will talk about it today, and we will keep reading one of the best papers as our example.
We are reading the paper written by Dr. Katalin Karikó & Dr. Drew Weissman, that led to the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023. We call it the Milestone Article 1. Here are two sets of links related to the paper.
Milestone Article 1:
- “Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors: the impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA” by Karikó, Buckstein, Ni & Weissman. Immunity, 23(2): 165-75, 2005.
- HTML: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2005.06.008
- PDF: https://www.cell.com/immunity/pdf/S1074-7613(05)00211-6.pdf
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16111635/
Copyright of the paper (as of July, 2025):
- See the pull-down menu “Article Info” near the top of the article webpage (Use the DOI above to reach it).
- Check the “User License” section which lists the “Elsevier user license”:
--- http://www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/
--- https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/open-access-licenses/elsevier-user
This episode = mini-series: reading-37.
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