The world was changing fast. When I arrived at Penn, the science library still used card catalogs, and science journals had to be read in print. By 2002, a little more than a decade after I arrived, all that would change. Science publications, including back issues, would be digitized; I could read them and save them to my laptop from anywhere in the world. But in 1997, the year I moved to neurosurgery, I still wandered through remote stacks of the library, picking up hard copies of Cell, as well as dozens of other journals, flipping through physical pages one at a time.
