TIL of ‘shepardising’, a technique used by lawyers while doing legal research, that Martine Rothblatt adapted to quickly learning everything there was to know about her daughter’s life-threatening illness.
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The story's actually pretty ridiculous: shortly after shepardising the research literature, Rothblatt found a single study about a molecule for congestive heart failure that failed for its primary purpose, but did EXACTLY what she needed for her daughter’s illness.
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The problem: Glaxo Wellcome refused to develop the drug. But they were willing to sell the rights to the molecule to another company for development.
So Rothblatt went out and started her own biomedical company, and hounded GW's execs until they sold her the rights.
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It also turns out that Shepard's Citations was one of the early inspirations for the Pagerank algorithm that Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed (that later turned into Google!)
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The tenacity and personal fire of this story is so inspiring, and reminds me also of this other story of a computer scientist basically supercharging personalized medicine for ultra-rare genetic disorders, to help his son: matt.might.net/articles/tenur
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