Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
Spent a career convincing ordinary Mexicans that astronomy belonged to them too
A Mexican astronomer who researched interstellar gas and galaxy formation while building planetariums, museums and television programmes to bring…
Dug out of an avalanche at 6,300 metres, she carried on and became the first woman to climb Everest
A small, sickly child who was told women should stay home, she founded a women’s climbing club, reached the top of Everest in 1975 and kept climbing…
Wheelchair user and businessman known as the father of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Left paralysed by polio as a teenager, he built a business career in Asia before devoting himself to disability rights, touring every US state to…
Diagnosed with MS at 23, she became the first Briton in 30 years to win Paralympic golds in two sports at one Games
A sprinter and cyclist who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2014 and told her athletics career was over, she instead switched disciplines and…
Gave up engineering to raid carpet looms and stone quarries and bring enslaved children out
For forty years he has led physical rescues of children from bonded labour in India, lost colleagues to violence, and pushed the campaign that…
Married at 12, widowed and destitute by 16, she later bought and rebuilt a bankrupt steel company
Born into a Dalit family in rural Maharashtra, she survived a child marriage, an attempted suicide and years of poverty in a Mumbai slum before…
Built India's first tissue culture laboratory and spent a career chasing the causes of cancer
A cell biologist who established India's first tissue culture research laboratory almost singlehandedly, then spent decades investigating the links…
Has climbed Everest more times than anyone alive and keeps doing it for a living wage
A mountain guide from a family of climbers, he has summited Everest more times than any other person on record, work that supports his family but…
A dyslexic accountant who launched a beer brand from the back of a car
Born in India and diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, he moved to Britain, qualified as an accountant despite the difficulty reading gave him, and…
A grenade destroyed his shooting hand, so he taught himself to shoot with the other and won two Olympic golds
Hungary's best pistol shot lost his right hand to a faulty grenade in 1938, practised in secret with his left, and ten years later won Olympic gold…
Demoted, denied grants and nearly deported, she kept faith with the idea behind mRNA vaccines
A butcher's daughter from a house with no running water, she spent decades on a technology almost nobody would fund. Her work made the Covid vaccines…
Three Olympic silvers, then gold at 36, then another silver at 40 after two years out of the boat
A Scottish rower who finished second at three Olympics in a row, she refused to retire, won gold in London at 36, and came back from a two-year break…
The NASA mathematician whose calculations put Americans into orbit and on the Moon
A Black woman in segregated Virginia, she did the orbital mathematics for the first US spaceflights by hand, and John Glenn refused to fly until she…
Built computers by hand in a tiny London lab and wrote the first assembly language
In a two-person group at Birkbeck College with almost no money, she helped design and build three early computers, wrote the first assembly language…
Went to prison for her beliefs and became one of the first two women elected to the Royal Society
She worked out the shape of the benzene ring at her kitchen table while raising three children, spent a month in Holloway as a wartime pacifist, and…
The first American woman to walk in space, and later the first person to also touch its deepest opposite
A geologist and astronaut who became the first American woman to walk in space in 1984, and in 2020 the first woman to reach the deepest point of the…
Abused by her coach as a teenager, she became the first American to win Olympic judo gold
Sexually abused by her judo coach from the age of 13, she nearly ended her life, then rebuilt her career under new coaches and won Olympic gold in…
A former army sergeant who won double Olympic gold at 34 after years of injury and despair
Injured season after season and privately at her lowest a year before the Games, she won both the 800 and 1500 metres in Athens in 2004, a double no…
A writer who took on Shell and the Nigerian military over his people’s land, and was hanged for it
A popular novelist and television writer who turned to organising the Ogoni people against the oil pollution of their delta homeland, he was tried by…
Told his brain-damaged newborn son would be better off dead, he chose otherwise and it remade his writing
A prize-winning young novelist whose son was born in 1963 with a severe brain condition, he refused the doctors' advice to let the child die and…
Sold into slavery mid-mission, he still finished the survey no one believed for thirty years
A Lepcha tailor recruited as a secret surveyor for British India, he was betrayed and sold into slavery in Tibet yet still completed a mission to…
Ran through crippling gallstones to win Olympic gold, then built a home for orphans
Orphaned as a small child and raised by an aunt, he became Kenya's first Olympic champion, beating a world record holder while barely able to stand…
Trained as a brewer, refused work as one, and started a biotech company in a garage
No Indian brewery would give a woman a job, so in 1978 she began making enzymes in a rented garage with 10,000 rupees. Banks would not lend to her…
Apprenticed at nine, he founded Panasonic in a tenement and refused to sack a single worker in the Depression
His father lost the family’s money speculating on rice, so he was sent to Osaka to work at nine. He started making light sockets with his wife and…
