PURE Insights

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
– Henry VI Part II Act 4 Scene 7

In one of my classes this year, I assigned first-year college students a project to find a news story based on medical research and then read that medical research. They protested: there was no way they, mere students with no medical training, could actually read a medical study. But, by the end of the project, they had all understood enough of a scientific journal article to tell if 1) a study was flawed or not and 2) if the media outlets had reported the research in good faith.

The bit of knowledge I shared with my students on scientific studies, statistics, and the media gave them the skills and confidence to check media sources and the freedom from relying on them.

In this way, doing research can free us from ignorance. The step students have taken in these pages is the second part of Shakespeare’s quote: they’ve created knowledge that will wing us all up.

In my last essay, I marveled at the heroic effort it took to conduct research during the pandemic when access to people and facilities was impeded. However, that implies that research at times without a global outbreak is not as heroic, which is false. Research, the pursuit of knowledge, is always a heroic thing because it requires understanding a field well enough to know where the holes in the literature are and then being courageous enough to take the prerogative to fill them.

I’m proud to be involved in the production of PURE Insights because I get to interact with the people (including the reviewers, editors, and support staff of this journal) who help the authors and sponsoring faculty that are bravely conducting research to lift us all up.

-Maren Bradley Anderson, Managing Editor