“There were many, many inspiring stories of people fighting cancer, for sure,” Lin would later say of his time at Johns Hopkins, where he received a dual MD-PhD in 2012. But despite his groundbreaking work, the young researcher had become increasingly haunted by an uncomfortable medical disparity: cancer claims nearly eight million lives a year, and attracts billions in federal research dollars, but multitudes more people—25 million in the U.S. alone, and 300 million globally, by some estimates—suffer from rare diseases or disorders for which there are often no clues, let alone cancer-esque coffers of funding.

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