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.
Answered a newspaper advert and became the first American woman in space, then went back to teaching
A physicist and near-professional tennis player who flew on the space shuttle in 1983, fielded questions about make-up and crying, and spent her…
Walked a thousand miles fleeing war as a boy, then walked back to dig wells
One of the "Lost Boys" who fled Sudan's civil war on foot as a child, he was resettled in the United States and returned years later to drill clean…
A Chicago surgeon who kept flying into besieged Aleppo to operate under bombardment
An American orthopaedic surgeon of Syrian descent who repeatedly volunteered in besieged hospitals in Aleppo, operating through airstrikes and…
Built a resort town on empty Egyptian desert coast that investors thought had no water and no tourists
Against advice that a stretch of barren Red Sea coast could never support a town, he spent years drilling for fresh water and building infrastructure…
A girl from a Pakistani mountain village who became the first Pakistani woman to reach the summit of Everest
Raised in the remote Shimshal valley of northern Pakistan, she became the first Pakistani woman to summit Mount Everest and later completed the Seven…
Cigar maker who founded the American Federation of Labor and led it for nearly forty years
An English-born Jewish immigrant who worked as a cigar maker in New York tenements, he founded the American Federation of Labor and spent almost four…
Walked eleven days to school from a Himalayan village and made cataract surgery cost a few dollars
A Nepali eye surgeon from a remote trading village who lost a sister to tuberculosis, trained with Fred Hollows, developed a sutureless cataract…
A rebellious boy jailed at eleven who drew the brain cell by cell and founded neuroscience
His father apprenticed him to a barber and a cobbler to cure his wildness. He survived malaria in Cuba and near-fatal tuberculosis, then used a…
Cut the feet off a pair of tights, wrote her own patent and sold fax machines until Spanx took off
After failing the law school entrance exam twice she spent seven years selling fax machines door to door. With 5,000 dollars of savings and a product…
Led the science behind the Arab world's first mission to another planet
A computer scientist by training, she became science lead of the Emirates Mars Mission, built with a team whose average age was under 35, and helped…
Rowed, cycled and kayaked around the world under her own power, surviving a typhoon along the way
A British adventurer who rowed solo across the Indian Ocean, then spent four years circling the globe entirely under her own power, surviving a…
Britain's most decorated Paralympian, a champion in two different sports across three decades
Born without a functioning left hand, she won Paralympic swimming golds at 14, switched to cycling after an ear infection ended her pool career, and…
A disguised Bengali scholar who mapped forbidden Tibet and inspired a character in Kim
A schoolteacher and Tibetan scholar who travelled twice into a Tibet closed to outsiders, gathering maps and manuscripts for the British while…
Carried a plastic bag for soil samples everywhere, and one of them held a drug that has treated billions
A farmer's son who taught at night school to fund his studies, and spent his career patiently sorting through soil bacteria. A sample from near a…
Pawned his wife’s jewellery to keep shooting a film that took three years and launched Indian cinema abroad
A commercial artist who had never made a film, he shot Pather Panchali on weekends with amateur actors and borrowed money, running out of funds again…
A widow with little business experience who took over a steel empire and made it bigger
When her husband, the founder of the Jindal steel and power group, died suddenly in a helicopter crash in 2005, she stepped in as chairperson at…
Walked to her girls' school through hurled dung and stones, carrying a spare sari to change into
Married at nine and taught to read by her husband, she opened one of India's first schools for girls in 1848, sheltered pregnant widows, and died…
The first woman from her Ethiopian district to go to university now runs a major African research centre
A plant pathologist who grew up on a farm where girls were expected to marry young, spent years in labs abroad, and then went back to Africa to work…
From public courts in Compton to 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one of them won while pregnant
Coached by her father on cracked public courts, she survived a life-threatening blood clot in 2011 and came back to win ten more Grand Slam titles,…
Sent to the gulag by Stalin, he came back to put the first satellite and the first man into space
Arrested and beaten in the purges, he survived a Siberian gold mine to become the anonymous Chief Designer behind Sputnik and Gagarin. His name was a…
His first symphony was savaged so badly he could not compose for three years
A composer whose family lost everything and whose first symphony was destroyed by critics, he was talked out of despair by a doctor using hypnosis…
Wrote the rules that keep cave divers alive, then died breaking his own depth record
An American cave diver who set numerous depth and distance records and wrote the safety rules that shaped modern cave diving, before dying while…
A would-be comic artist who was handed a pile of failed arcade cabinets and turned them into Donkey Kong
Hired by Nintendo as a staff artist through his father's connections, he was asked in 1981 to salvage unsold arcade machines and created Mario. His…
A surgeon so slow his colleagues called him "the obstacle" found a way to turn back the clock on cells
He gave up surgery after failing at it, fell into depression when his research stalled, and nearly quit science. Then he showed that adult cells…
