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.
Barred from her university by fascist race laws, she built a lab in her bedroom
Sharpened sewing needles, a home-made incubator and fertilised eggs from local farms: the research that won her a Nobel Prize began in hiding during…
Survived the Khmer Rouge camps as a child and spent his career filming Cambodia's buried memory
A child survivor of Khmer Rouge labour camps who lost most of his family to starvation and execution, he fled to France and became a filmmaker…
Directed the operations that put an Indian spacecraft into orbit around Mars on the first attempt
A schoolgirl in Lucknow who cut out newspaper clippings about space missions, she became a rare woman in India's aerospace establishment and helped…
First to the South Pole, first through the Northwest Passage, and prepared for both by listening
He learned dog-driving and fur clothing from the Inuit, kept his change of plan secret from almost everyone, and reached the South Pole in December…
Was disqualified from his first Olympic race walk and went on to win four gold medals
Thrown out of his debut Olympic race in 1992 for a technical fault, he rebuilt his technique and became the most successful Olympic race walker in…
Nearly lost his arm in a rally crash, returned to Formula One eight years later, then won Le Mans
Poland's first Formula One driver, a Grand Prix winner whose right arm was partly severed in a 2011 rally crash, he fought his way back to the F1…
A draper’s apprentice who ran a cotton mill on the idea that workers were people, not parts
At New Lanark he cut hours, took young children out of the mill and put them in a school, and proved it could still make money. He then lost most of…
Mocked for his accent and his colour, he got 3,000 hits and died flying aid to earthquake victims
A sugar-cane cutter's son who became one of baseball's greatest outfielders while enduring racism from the press, he was killed when a plane carrying…
The only one of nine who finished the first non-stop solo race around the world, and gave away the prize
In a small wooden ketch with a broken radio and self-steering, he spent 312 days alone at sea in 1968-69 to become the first person to sail non-stop…
Walked seventeen hundred miles across the Australian desert alone with four camels and a dog
An Australian writer who spent nine months in 1977 walking roughly seventeen hundred miles alone across the Australian desert with four camels and a…
Lost his father to prison at 16, fought depression and addiction, and won seven world snooker titles
A prodigy whose father was jailed for murder when he was a teenager, he battled depression, drink and drugs for years and kept coming back, winning…
Her refusal to give up a bus seat sparked the modern civil rights movement
Often described as simply tired, she was in fact a trained activist who had spent a decade fighting segregation before the evening in 1955 that made…
Her X-ray photograph revealed the shape of DNA, and others took the credit
A meticulous experimentalist whose X-ray images of DNA were shown to rivals without her knowledge. She died at 37, four years before the Nobel Prize…
Walked out of Russia with no money, opened a furniture shop at 43 and worked until she was 103
Born near Minsk, she talked her way past a border guard in 1917 and reached Omaha, Nebraska. She opened Nebraska Furniture Mart with 500 dollars, was…
The first African woman admitted to a French Grande Ecole went on to lead an AI research team
A brilliant student from Senegal who broke into France's most selective engineering schools when almost no African women were admitted, she spent her…
Built a typhus vaccine using lice he fed on his own skin, then used the lab to shelter people from the Nazis
A biologist who invented the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus by breeding infected lice, then used his laboratory in occupied Poland…
A dairy farmer's son who beat the unbeatable Karelin, then survived frostbite, a plane crash and near ruin
The youngest of nine children on a Wyoming farm, he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history in 2000, then lost a toe in a snowmobile…
Stranded in Karachi on her way somewhere else, she stayed 57 years and beat leprosy in Pakistan
A German doctor and nun held up in Karachi by a visa problem in 1960, she visited a leprosy colony and never left. Her clinics and trained workers…
Born without legs, he refused a wheelchair as a child and became the best wheelchair rugby player in the world
A boy from Port Macquarie who got around on a skateboard rather than accept a wheelchair, he was a Paralympian at 15 and led Australia to…
Went blind as a child, then founded Tibet's first school for blind children and trained social entrepreneurs
Blind from the age of twelve, she developed a Tibetan braille script, founded a pioneering school for blind children in Lhasa, and later built…
A kidnapped Shoshone teenager whose knowledge and calm saved an American expedition
Kidnapped from her people as a child and later sold into marriage, she carried her infant son across the Rockies while guiding, translating and…
The first woman to run the UN refugee agency, through some of its worst years
A political scientist who spent ten years as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, pushing the agency into the middle of the Gulf War, Bosnia and Rwanda…
Built a fair trade fashion label from a home office because no one else would
After working on environmental and development issues in Japan, she founded People Tree in 1991 to prove that clothing made through fair trade with…
An orphan who shot a sparrow, asked what it was, and became the birdman of India
He never finished a degree and spent years failing at business. Then he walked the subcontinent counting birds, wrote the book that taught a nation…
