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.
The archbishop who took on apartheid from the pulpit and then chaired the commission that heard its crimes
A teacher who quit rather than teach under apartheid’s inferior schooling for Black children, he became the voice of the struggle when its leaders…
Arrived from Colombia speaking almost no English and went on to direct a Mars rover landing
Moved to the United States from Colombia at seventeen with little money and little English, she cleaned houses to pay for classes, eventually became…
Sent to France at five, a late starter who won the Champions League and helped stop a civil war
An Ivorian striker who did not become a full professional until his twenties, won everything with Chelsea, and used a live television broadcast to…
Built the hospital his own mother could not reach in time, and kept building more
A Congolese basketball star who, grieving a mother who died for lack of medical care, spent much of his NBA fortune building a modern hospital in…
Started a security company with a single client and one van in Zimbabwe
She left a stable insurance career to start a private security company in Zimbabwe with almost no capital, at a time when the industry was assumed to…
Lost the use of two fingers in a caravan fire and reinvented the guitar with the ones he had left
An illiterate Romani teenager already famous in the dance halls of Paris, he was burned so badly at 18 that doctors wanted to amputate his leg. He…
Waited on the landing at night with a packed suitcase so his family would not see him arrested
Denounced by Stalin's newspaper at 29 and again by the Party at 41, he lived in fear of the knock at the door and wrote fifteen symphonies and…
Worked as a janitor and petrol station attendant before opening a small Los Angeles clothing store
A Korean immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles speaking little English, he worked menial jobs before opening a small clothing shop in 1984 with his…
Co-founded the farm workers’ union, negotiated its first contracts and coined "Sí, se puede"
A schoolteacher who quit because she could not bear to see her pupils come to class hungry, she organised alongside César Chávez for decades, raised…
A miner's wife whose five-woman hunger strike brought down a dictatorship's grip on Bolivia
She organised the housewives of a tin-mining camp, told a United Nations women's conference that its concerns were not hers, and in 1977 began a…
A young naval officer who spent five hours descending to a depth no one had ever reached
A US Navy officer who piloted the bathyscaphe Trieste with Jacques Piccard to the deepest known point of the ocean in 1960, then spent the following…
Never bothered to apply for a full professorship, and won the Nobel Prize for her first research paper
A laser physicist who spent her career happily in the lab rather than chasing titles, and was the third woman ever to win the physics Nobel, for work…
Found the mentally ill chained in unheated cells and shamed legislatures into building hospitals
A schoolteacher broken by ill health who, at 39, visited a jail and found insane women locked in the cold. She spent the next forty years documenting…
Left lame by polio, she walked the Depression’s breadlines and gave the era its face
Polio at seven left her with a lifelong limp, and her father abandoned the family. She turned a portrait business into a decade of documenting the…
A dog breeder in Switzerland who answered a blind man's letter and started the guide dog movement
A wealthy widow breeding German shepherds in Switzerland, she wrote a magazine article about dogs guiding blinded veterans in Germany, trained a dog…
Mapped penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin with hands crippled by arthritis
Told at 24 that rheumatoid arthritis would twist her hands for life, she spent the next sixty years teasing the structures of vital molecules out of…
An American nun shot dead defending Amazon farmers from the loggers she confronted
A Catholic nun from Ohio who spent nearly four decades helping poor settlers farm sustainably in the Brazilian Amazon, resisting illegal loggers and…
Ran a segregated team of Black mathematicians, then taught them all to program before the machines arrived
A schoolteacher who joined the wartime aeronautics laboratory at Langley in 1943, she became its first Black supervisor and, when electronic…
Demonstrated the mouse, hypertext and video calls in 1968, then lost his funding and was forgotten
A Depression-era farm boy who decided to devote his life to making computers help people think. His 1968 demonstration showed nearly everything we…
A civil servant who watched his father die of cancer and spent his salary founding a charity to help others
In 1911, grieving his father, a Somerset-born clerk in the Board of Agriculture founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer from his…
Given six months to rebuild a cyclone-wrecked bridge, he did it in 46 days, then built India's metros on time
A railway engineer from Kerala known for finishing things early and under budget, he drove the Konkan Railway through 760 kilometres of mountains and…
Paralysed by polio, he fought his way into Berkeley and launched the independent living movement
Paralysed from the neck down at 14, he was refused a high school diploma, refused by his university, and told he was unemployable. He built the…
A university gardener who found out he did not own his island and took the case that ended terra nullius
Exiled from Murray Island as a teenager, he learned over lunch with two historians that Australian law did not recognise his family's land. Ten years…
A nurse who helped 200 soldiers escape occupied Belgium and was shot for it
Matron of a Brussels nursing school, she hid Allied soldiers and guided them to neutral Holland. Arrested and court-martialled, she was executed at…
