People
People · 24 stories
24 stories
Louis Braille: six dots that lit a path for children in the dark
Blinded at three, the French boy Louis Braille perfected the six-dot braille alphabet at fifteen, giving blind people everywhere the gifts of reading and music. He died poor and little known; more than a century later, his alphabet still lights the way for children in the dark.
Jonas Salk: a vaccine that could have been sold, given to the world
Jonas Salk developed the world's first successful polio vaccine, then refused to patent it, telling Edward R. Murrow: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
Tim Berners-Lee: when the web was born, he chose to give it away
In 1989 he wrote his hypertext proposal at CERN, and around Christmas 1990 he and Robert Cailliau connected the first web server to the first browser. When tolls and patents were suggested, he said: "It should be a square. Squares don't charge."
Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Thirty Million Trees
The Kenyan biologist founded the Green Belt Movement: plant a tree, keep it alive, earn a few cents. Rural women planted thirty million trees in thirty years, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Zhong Yang: forty million seeds, his gift to the future
The Fudan professor spent sixteen years on the Tibetan plateau collecting seeds of over a thousand plant species — forty million of them, some gathered above 6,000 meters. "One gene can save a nation; one seed can benefit all."
Tu Youyou: one artemisia plant that saved millions worldwide
After 190 failed extracts, experiment No. 191 — inspired by a 1,600-year-old text — reached 100% inhibition. She tested the drug on herself, and artemisinin went on to save millions from malaria.
Zhang Fuqing: war medals locked in a suitcase for sixty-three years
A special-merit hero of the Northwest Field Army chose, on demobilization, the remotest county in Hubei — and never mentioned his medals for sixty-three years. "Compared with my fallen comrades, what right do I have to show off?"
Mao Xianglin: seven years chiseling a road into the cliff face
Xiazhuang village sat at the bottom of a giant sinkhole ringed by sheer cliffs. From 1997, Mao Xianglin led villagers with hammers and steel rods for seven years, carving an eight-kilometer road out of the rock.
Marie Curie: distilling light that belongs to all humanity, in a leaky shed
Four years of stirring tons of pitchblende yielded one-tenth gram of radium — glowing blue in a drafty shed. She refused to patent the process: radium belongs to all people. Two Nobel Prizes, a lifetime of thrift, notebooks still radioactive today.
Jane Goodall: sixty years in the forest, waiting for chimpanzees to trust her
At twenty-six she walked into Gombe with a notebook and binoculars. Her method was patience itself — and the chimpanzees' trust rewrote the definition of being human. Sixty years later, an old friend still recognized her.
Helen Keller: the word at the well that opened a world without sight or sound
Deaf and blind from nineteen months, she lived seven years without language — until Anne Sullivan pumped water over one hand and spelled w-a-t-e-r into the other. That day, everything got a name.
Audrey Hepburn: her most beautiful late role, holding children's hands
In her late fifties the screen princess became a UNICEF ambassador, visiting the hardest places on earth for five years. "As you grow older, you will discover you have two hands — one for helping yourself, the other for helping others."