Meet one of the world's most groundbreaking scientists. He's 34. (2015)
statnews.com
statnews.com
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.
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.