The best thing I've read this year

This is the most impressive thing I have read this year. It is like the great twenty-first century American novel reduced to a concise interview. It hits it all: the power of mentorship, race, poverty, elitism, immigration, freakin' brain cancer.

My favorite part:

Some years later, I was sitting at a lunch table with colleagues at Harvard Medical School. Someone asked how I’d come to Harvard. “I hopped the fence,” I said. Everyone laughed. They thought I was joking.

If this man's life were a Fitzgerald novel, this would be the pivotal scene. The elitist response to the mythical American dream of social mobility, so rarely achieved that it must be a joke.