What struck me about Pardis's story is how remarkably late it was in her training before she identified the mission that now defines her career. This lateness is best represented by her decision to still attend--and finish!--medical school even though she was working on PhD research that was starting to attract notice. These are not the actions of someone who is certain of her destiny from day one. This certainty didn't come until later, around the time of her Nature publication, when Pardis had finally developed her computational genetics ideas to the point where their usefulness and novelty were obvious.