Your road map to success

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence, particularly “road map”: Your goals are your road map to success.

My comments:

Here, life is likened to a long journey, a road map showing all the roads linking up towns and cities, small and big.

And your goals, goals you set for yourself at each stage of your personal growth and development are likened to those towns and cities on the map.

By achieving those goals, big and small, you succeed in life. It’s like reaching all the towns and cities to complete your journey.

Let me give you an example. Let’s use a common road map for a child in China. I say common because the road map for every child seems to be the same.

From the beginning of primary school, we are told to work hard and have good grades.

Having good grades in primary school, we’re told, will ensure that we can enter a good junior high school, which, in turn, ensure that we enroll at a good senior high.

We’re supposed to keep working hard and keep having good grades, of course.

Then, good grades in senior high school will help us get into university.

Keep working hard and keep achieving good grades, we’re told, so that we’ll get a well-paying job after graduation.

Getting a well-paying job is important. It is, in fact, crucial if we want to get married, start a family and raise children of our own.

That seems to be all. Then parents let their children go, so to speak. I mean, Chinese parents seem to run out of ideas about what else their children should do afterwards, other than raising children of their own.

This is a simplistic point of view, but you get the point.

Again, this “good grades mean everything” scenario is the common road map parents draw for their children. It is common and nothing special.

I mean, it is special if you’re able to achieve them but it doesn’t feel special because everybody else does it.

Perhaps what I really want to say is, do not stop there.

Keep moving.

Yes, keep moving and keep going places, as they say.

Keep going places and having new experiences.

Brand new experiences.

Perhaps that’s how to make your life’s journey special.

Now, let’s read a few “road map” examples in recent media:

1. His final day of work last Friday was no different from when Willie Sumlar started on Aug. 12, 1957.

“I was trying to get stuff done,” Sumlar said. “You know me, I complete the day.”

Sumlar, 84, of Orange, is so thorough that he has not missed a scheduled day of work in 62 years with the maintenance department for Essex County government in Newark.

He’s never taken a sick day. Let that marinate.

It’s just not him to take off, even he didn’t feel well. He’d pushed through any discomfort to be at work by 5 a.m., an hour before his shift started at 6 a.m.

“There’s so much that needs to be done,” Sumlar said.

Friday was the last day for this retiring senior repairman to get it done, and the last time for the county to thank him for doing it his way. More than 200 county workers surprised him with a standing ovation.

Someone took the pair of pliers from his hands when the applause started in the lobby of the Hall of Records. It continued outside on the grounds as he walked out of the door heading toward the parking lot, escorted by his supervisors.

“I tell ya, it really draws tears to your eyes,” Sumlar said.

It was hugs and picture taking with a man who did whatever was asked of him. Work orders weren’t his style. He just did the work.

Sumlar moved and repaired office furniture. He rearranged rooms, shampooed courtroom rugs and washed windows, scrubbed and waxed floors. If it snowed, he removed it. There’s a piece of this carpenter, painter and custodian everywhere throughout the government complex.

“I can’t say enough good things about Willie Sumlar,” said Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo. “Whether you were a longtime or new employee or just a visitor to our county complex, Willie extended his kindness to you, welcomed you to the county and always was ready to lend a helping hand.”

Never one to sit still, Sumlar didn’t stop working after he clocked out at 2 p.m. He’d leave the county for a job at a caterer in Newark, where he cleaned, delivered food, and checked inventory.

He did this late into the night, seven days a week, getting home for a few winks before heading back to the county in the morning. By his count, he never missed a day at the caterer in 15 years.

Work has been his road map to a better life.

- In 62 years, N.J. man never missed a day of work, NJ.com, July 5, 2019.

2. Apples-to-apples comparisons in the distant universe are hard to come by.

Whether the subject is dwarf galaxies, supermassive black holes, or “hot Jupiters,” astronomers can spend months or years searching for comparable objects and formations to study. And it is rarer still when those objects are side-by-side.

But a new Yale study offers a road map for finding “twin” planetary systems – showing whether binary stars that orbit each other, and that were born at the same time and place, tend to host similar orbiting planets. The study’s authors found that certain orientations of twin star systems may provide critical information about planet formation, while also being easier for astronomers to discover planets within the systems.

The side-by-side, “edge on” configuration of certain binary star systems potentially allows astronomers to do comparative studies, in the same way that doctors study human twins to gain knowledge about biological and behavioral mechanisms.

“This could be an unprecedented avenue for examining how deterministic, or orderly, the process of planet formation is,” said Malena Rice, an assistant professor of astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior author of the new study.

The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The first author is Joseph Hand, an undergraduate at the University of Kansas who conducted the research as a Dorrit Hoffleit Undergraduate Research Scholar, a Yale fellowship named in honor of the longtime Yale astronomer. Konstantin Gerbig, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of the study.

In earlier work, Rice identified an unexpectedly large number of binary systems with orbits that are perfectly aligned, meaning that the two binary stars and their planets orbit on the same geometrical plane. In such systems, the companion star can serve as a stabilizer for the planets’ orbits, preventing dramatic long-term climate variations that may otherwise be destructive to life as we know it.

These “edge-on” binary systems, because of their alignment, are also excellent candidates for the detection of new planets, according to the researchers: the stars wobble directly toward and away from Earth, creating a signal boost.

For the study, the team identified nearly 600 edge-on binary star systems based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia DR3 catalogue of high-precision stellar astrometry. Drawing from the Gaia dataset, the researchers found the brightest nearby binary star systems, measured their orbits, and simulated the set of expected planets waiting to be discovered orbiting each star.

The result, researchers say, is essentially a prediction for locations in the sky where planet-hunters are more likely to find new planets to identify and characterize – and, for the first time, to compare planets across stars in the same system.

- Astronomers take a second look at twin star systems, Yale.edu, May 14, 2025.

3. Within minutes of KJ Muldoon’s birth, doctors knew there was something very wrong.

Five weeks premature, his little arms went rigid when lifted and shook oddly on the way back down.

An attentive doctor at the University of Pennsylvania, checking for a host of possible causes, noticed that KJ’s ammonia level was off the charts.

He was rushed across the street to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where doctors quickly offered a dire diagnosis. His body couldn’t clear ammonia, which is produced when the body turns protein from food into energy. Without being able to urinate it out, like healthy people do, the ammonia would build up and damage first his brain and then his whole body.

By day two of KJ’s life, his parents Kyle and Nicole were getting the worst possible news: “I heard ‘death’ or ‘severely developmentally disabled.’ There wasn’t really a whole lot of getting around that,” Kyle remembered.

Yet nine months later, KJ is smiling, sitting up unassisted and – on one recent day – happily eating avocado. “He’s defeated all odds and obstacles so far that were put in his way. He exceeds our expectations,” Nicole said in a May 12 call with reporters.

All this is possible because KJ is the first-ever recipient of a gene therapy designed to treat only a single person.

Every month for the past three, he’s received an infusion of billions of tiny balls of fat, containing instructions to edit genes in his liver cells. Fixing the genetic mistake in at least some of his liver cells enables his body to make an enzyme called CPS1, which is needed to break down protein. KJ’s ammonia level is now pretty close to normal.

Doctors say it’s too early to declare KJ “cured” or know what the rest of his life will look like. But he’s definitely on a better trajectory than when Nicole and Kyle, who have three older children, were told the best they could hope for was to minimize KJ’s suffering.

“Seeing him reach milestones that are important for any infant as they’re developing blows us away even more because we know what was stacked up against him and how bad of a prognosis it was in the very beginning,” said Nicole, 34 of Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania.

…

The lessons doctors are learning on KJ will hopefully be used to help many other children. They published KJ’s results in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 15.

“The exciting piece here is this may turn out to be the new paradigm for very rare diseases,” said Dr. Peter Marks, who ran the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversaw the development of KJ’s personalized treatment.

The exact genetic fix will be different for each person, but the approach is very repeatable, said Marks, who has since left the FDA.

“Ninety-nine percent is going to be the same whether you’re treating this child or another,” he said. “This is really exciting because it may give us the road map for how to move forward in this rare disease space, very efficiently bringing in long-lasting treatments and potential cures to children who otherwise would never have had any hope of having them.”

- This baby’s future was bleak, USAToday.com, May 15, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）