Dave Richardson said his wife’s philosophy background has benefited their shared lab in countless ways. “There is an impression that scientists think and question things, but as a matter of fact, they’re not better than anyone else,” he said. “The philosophers really question. For them, it’s not a matter of asking questions, but deciding what questions to ask. Jane is amazing at that—she can hold off for a long time before she jumps to any conclusions and I think that’s a real gift.”





Not only has Jane Richardson been trained to think critically, but she also makes a point to get away and make time for reflection. Every summer, the Richardsons disappear to their cabin high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, just a few miles off the John Muir Trail, to think. They backpack for a week, or even a month, winding through rocky back country trails as well as enjoying the spectacular view from their front porch .





They follow the advice of their long-ago mentor, biochemist Fred Richards, who made a point to get away during the summer. While Richards chose to sail up and down the Atlantic coast, the Richardsons backpack in the mountains every summer.





“A lot of the reason we do this, as Fred did, is that things are very competitive and time-conscious, and much more now than they were,” said Jane Richardson. “You’re always behind. And it always is that something should have been done last week or last year or whatever. So you keep pushing at whatever you’re doing without really having the time to step back and figure out if you should be doing something different or in a different way. We find that it takes us about a week to get to the stage where we’re away from things long enough to get that perspective. We have switched what we were doing a number of times and it mostly was ideas that we got while we were in the middle of a backpacking trip. Those new directions have included developing kinemage graphics, going into early protein de novo design, and having our first child. In contrast, it was one of our students, Laura Murray, who got us into studying the enlighteningly distinct but similar RNA molecules.”