
Meet one of the world's most groundbreaking scientists. He's 34. (2015) - helloworld
https://www.statnews.com/2015/11/06/hollywood-inspired-scientist-rewrite-code-life/
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helloworld
This caught my eye:

 _Driving home in the gathering dark one autumn evening, mother and son were
struck by the sight of falling leaves, dead and dying after lives measured in
mere months. They spoke about how little time anyone has, she recalled, and
how easy it is for a life to disappear without the slightest trace that it had
ever been. "It just seemed important to me to try my best to make a
difference," Zhang said._

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fuzzfactor
great timeline on a transformative individual and the technology he's chosen
to transform right now

looks like he has overcome great lack of good fortune from a young age

realistically, also, the Intel scholarship in 2000 is such a rare form of
(well-deserved) good fortune that very few other scientists will ever have the
ability to leverage something like that

sadly, as recently as 2009 - 2010 it also looks like a very temporary slight
lack of institutional political good fortune could very well have derailed the
whole thing

if nobody had "sung his praises" and/or nobody had listened at the time, there
would have been no breakthrough nearly as advanced by now

the best of science can easily become worthless in an institutional
environment without a high level of political good fortune

transformative science is more common than you think, what's really rare as a
unicorn is a breakthrough-capable scientist with an unbroken chain of
political and/or financial good fortune

especially in labs that are unique, expensive, hazardous, controversial, etc.

