Former illegal immigrant makes good as brain surgeon

Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa was a farm worker in the Central Valley before moving onto Berkeley, Harvard, UCSF and John Hopkins University.

He’s caught the attention of various media, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to spread an interesting life story with a Valley connection.

• Here’s a link to an interview from the New York Times

I was a farm laborer in the San Joaquin Valley, seven days a week, sunup to sundown. I lived in this little trailer I paid $300 a month for. It didn’t take long to see that farm work was a dead end.

-Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

Here are links to other articles about Dr. Quinones-Hinojosa:

• Reader’s Digest
• Hopkins Medical Magazine- A magazine for the John Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Medical School.
  
• Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Bio of Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
  
• DOME, a Johns Hopkins’ In-house publication
  
• Science Daily
• NPR

 

Unauthorized supplement to Brain Drain Chronicles

Also, we weren’t sure how to approach this, since this whole blogging protocol is so new, but there’s a really good thread about our Brain Drain Chronicles going on at the online community FresnoFamous.com.

We put the link in one of our comments, but it’s too hard to see, so here it is for those on the run.

Also, we’re probably speaking to the choir, but another place where engaged citizens could discuss issues raised by the interviews is Creative Fresno’s Mindhub, an email list-serve you can sign up for here.

For some reason that mimics our entire nerdy childhoods, people would rather talk about us, than to us. And maybe that’s why we left you, Fresno cool crowd. That’s right, we left Y-O-U. (And just so you know we’re now super-skinny and much hotter than when we left.)

Kidding aside, we understand that sometimes it makes sense to talk to a crowd of friends versus a super-square couple you haven’t met. That’s why we have each other, and as we always say, “@7 l3@57 We GoTz EaCh 07H3R “