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.
A Japanese diplomat who wrote visas by hand for weeks against orders, saving thousands of Jews
Vice-consul in Kaunas in 1940, he defied Tokyo three times and issued transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Poland, still writing them as his…
Sequenced West Africa's deadliest outbreaks and got the results out before the world caught up
A Cameroonian-born molecular biologist who built a genomics laboratory in Nigeria capable of sequencing Lassa fever, Ebola and, within days of the…
Written off as mentally disabled at birth, he wrote and painted with the only limb he could control
Born with severe cerebral palsy into a Dublin family of thirteen surviving children, he could move only his left foot. With it he wrote the letter A…
Made billions from duty-free shopping and gave every penny away in secret
The son of a nurse and an insurance clerk, he co-founded Duty Free Shoppers and then quietly transferred his entire stake to a foundation. Nobody…
Ran away from a starving farm four times and built Hyundai, then drove 1,001 cows back to repay his father
The eldest son of a poor farmer in what is now North Korea, he took the money from the sale of a cow to escape to Seoul. He sold ships before he had…
Nurse, social worker, then doctor at 38, she invented the modern hospice
Told that only a doctor could change how the dying were treated, she qualified in her late thirties, studied pain properly, and in 1967 opened St…
Named kwashiorkor, took on the milk companies and survived a Japanese prison camp
A Jamaican-born paediatrician in the Gold Coast who identified the childhood malnutrition disease kwashiorkor, attacked the marketing of condensed…
Carried supplies to the battlefields of the Civil War, then founded the American Red Cross
A shy schoolteacher and government clerk who drove wagons of bandages to the front lines of the American Civil War, traced 22,000 missing soldiers…
A retired foster mother in Harlem who took in babies born addicted to heroin, more than a thousand of them
Widowed young, she cleaned houses and fostered dozens of children. At 64 her daughter sent her a woman with a heroin-addicted baby, and within months…
A child prodigy who supported eight children by touring Europe for sixty years
Pushed onto the stage at nine by a domineering father, she fought him in court to marry Robert Schumann, then held her family together through his…
Mocked, broke and half blind, he painted the water lilies that fill two rooms in Paris
The word Impressionism was coined to ridicule him. He was so poor that he tried to drown himself, buried his young wife, and painted his last great…
Fled Burma through the jungle in 1988 and opened a clinic in a barn that now sees 100,000 patients a year
A young Karen doctor who escaped the crackdown on the 1988 uprising and set up a clinic for refugees on the Thai border in Mae Sot, sterilising…
Learned to swim at 16 after watching the Paralympics on television, and won 27 medals
Born with malformed arms and legs, he did not enter a pool until he was a teenager, then became the most successful male Paralympic swimmer of his…
Photocopied 7,000 pages of secret Vietnam history at night and faced 115 years in prison for it
A Pentagon analyst who had helped write the study showing that four presidents had misled the public about Vietnam, he leaked it to the press in 1971…
A one-woman newsroom who exposed corruption at the top of Maltese politics and was killed by a car bomb
Her blog was read by more people than all of Malta's newspapers combined. She named ministers in the Panama Papers, faced dozens of libel suits and…
Uganda's first openly gay activist, who won a court case against a tabloid that called for him to be hanged
A teacher who came out on his return from South Africa and spent years campaigning against Uganda's anti-homosexuality bill. Weeks after winning a…
A mill worker turned missionary whose maps of Africa served both abolition and empire
A missionary doctor who mapped huge stretches of central Africa while campaigning against the slave trade, he vanished for years, was found by a…
Quit racing in disillusionment at 18, came back and won four golds in a week at London 2012
Born unable to use his legs, he walked away from wheelchair racing after a dispiriting first Paralympics, returned years later and became one of the…
Paralysed by a spinal tumour at 29, she became the first Indian woman to win a Paralympic medal at 45
An army officer's wife who lost the use of her legs after surgery for a spinal tumour, she took up sport in her late thirties and won Paralympic…
Ran away from farm work at thirteen and ended up leading her own expeditions across Africa
Married to a famous taxidermist, she went on two African expeditions as his equal partner, then after their divorce led her own trek into Congo…
Rejected by the national team for being too short, she won four Olympic table tennis golds
At just 1.5 metres tall she was told she had no future in table tennis. She became the dominant player of the 1990s, then went from having no formal…
The Congolese surgeon who has repaired tens of thousands of women brutalised by war
A gynaecologist whose first hospital was destroyed in war, he founded Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in 1999 and became the world's leading expert in…
Created the C language and co-wrote Unix, the quiet foundations of almost every computer today
Working on a cast-off machine after a big project collapsed, he and Ken Thompson wrote an operating system for themselves. His language C and their…
The first Black African woman to win Olympic gold, who won the New York Marathon at 37
A farmer's daughter from the Ethiopian highlands who won the Olympic 10,000 metres in 1992, won it again eight years later after having a child, and…
