Paul Berg is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and a respected biochemist and geneticist. He is most renowned for his pioneering work involving recombinant DNA, the process of inserting DNA from another species into a molecule, leading to the development of...

In the late 1960s, it was already known that hormones such as adrenalin, histamine, dopamine and serotonin stimulate specific responses in the cells of human beings and other organisms. But the mechanism by which cells perceive and respond to these hormones was shrouded in mystery. In...

A distinguished physician, educator and public servant, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan was the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (H&HS) in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The son of an undertaker in rural Georgia, Louis Sullivan excelled academically and...

Every year, recipients of the Nobel Prize participate in the programs of the Academy of Achievement, sharing their groundbreaking discoveries with the Academy's members and student delegates. Now you can see and hear many of these intimate and fascinating presentations by the world's great...

Susie Marshall Sharp (July 7, 1907 – March 1, 1996) was a pioneer in the legal profession, and a distinguished jurist who became the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court. In 1926, she entered law school at the University of North Carolina at...

Reuben Mattus (1912 – 1994) was a Polish American entrepreneur who, with his wife Rose, founded the Haagen-Dazs ice cream business. He was a 12-year-old South Bronx boy who helped his widowed mother sell her lemon ices. Mattus left high school to make deliveries with a horse-drawn wagon to...

Ian Frazer was working with AIDS patients in the early 1980s when he first noticed a correlation between the sexually transmitted papilloma virus and cervical cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death among women, especially in the developing world. A young immunologist, newly arrived in...

Sir James David Wolfensohn was the ninth President of the World Bank and President of Wolfensohn & Company, an international investment-banking firm. Wolfensohn was born in Sydney, Australia, entered Sydney University at age 15, and became a lawyer with a local firm. His initial...

Johannes Erbprinz von Thurn und Taxis (1926 – 1990) was a Bavarian banker and industrialist, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and the owner of the glittering Palace of Regensburg. The patriarch of one of the most celebrated German families, he oversaw a thousand-year-old dynasty from...

"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do." When Benjamin Carson was in fifth grade, he was considered the "dummy" of his class. His classmates and teachers took it for granted that Ben would take an...

The Founder and Artistic Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell created a training school and the first African-American classical ballet company. Born in Harlem, he graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City in the early 1950s, and won a dance...

Karan began her career as an assistant designer with Anne Klein in the late 1960s, where she was eventually promoted to associate designer in 1971. When Anne Klein herself died in 1974, Takihyo Corporation of Japan became the new owner and Karan, together with her former classmate and...

Michael M. Kaiser is the President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. D.C. An honors graduate of Brandeis and the MIT Sloan School of Management, he studied vocal music, which instilled within him a passion for the arts. Kaiser hoped for a career as an...

One of the nation's largest shopping center developers, Theodore "Ted" Lerner is a self-made man. When his father died, young Ted worked day and night to support his mother and siblings. He sold houses on weekends while attending George Washington University Law School. The year after...

Henry Kravis is one of the most successful investment bankers in history. He is famous in the business world for pioneering the leveraged buyout (or LBO), that is, borrowing money to buy a controlling interest in a given company. As managing partner of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), he...

In 1980, Douglas Carlston founded Broderbund Software, Inc., which quickly became the nation's leading developer of educational software. A pioneer in employing game technology, Carlston started the company as a sideline while practicing law. The company achieved major success with its...

Greg Marshall is a scientist, inventor, and filmmaker who has dedicated the last 25 years to studying, exploring, and documenting life in the oceans.
 Beginning in 1986, he developed a revolutionary research tool to record images, sound, and data from an animal's perspective. Today that...

At age 15, Francis Collins "...had no interest in biology, or medicine, or any of those aspects of science that dealt with this messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense." A...

Don and Doris Fisher founded and then transformed a single store in San Francisco stocked with Levi’s, records and tapes into a thriving, nearly $15 billion global business with more than 134,000 employees, more than 3,100 stores and a permanent place in pop cultural history....

John Guare first won fame at age 29 as the author of the award-winning play House of Blue Leaves (1971) , a distinctive mixture of family drama, black comedy and satire, successfully revived in New York in 1986 and again in 2011. For forty years, he has enjoyed unusually consistent success...

Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the breadth and versatility of her artistry as both singer and actress. With a record-setting six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and a long list of other accolades to her name, she is among today's most highly regarded performers. Blessed with a luminous...

Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold is the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and is the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is building a large patent portfolio. He was a precocious student who began college at age 14, and studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA....

Kiri Te Kanawa created a sensation in 1971, when she made her debut as the Countess in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Audiences were captivated by the lyric splendor of her voice and the exquisite tenderness of her interpretation. Soon she was a...

Dr. Louis Sokoloff was the Chief of the Laboratory of Cerebral Metabolism at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his college degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 and graduated from Penn's School of Medicine in 1946. He joined the...

James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City to Hellen Ingram Merrill and Charles E. Merrill, founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm. He had two older half siblings (a brother and a sister) from his father's first marriage. As a boy, Merrill enjoyed a highly privileged...

Today, Diane Sawyer is known to millions as the host of the daily evening newscast ABC World News, but she long been familiar to American television audiences through her decade as the host of the same network's Good Morning America program, and for her previous career at CBS News. ...

Fred Smith, Chairman and CEO of Federal Express Corporation, is known as the "father of the overnight delivery business." A Marine Corps veteran who once teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, he is one of American business's greatest success stories. As an undergraduate at Yale, Fred Smith...

Roger Bannister was still a medical student in 1954, when he made headlines around the world with one of the landmark events of 20th century sports history. At the time, it was thought to be impossible for a human being to run a mile in under four minutes. The world record of 4:01.3 had stood for...

As a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, Hans Keirstead invented a method for regenerating damaged spinal cords using embryonic human stem cells. His work holds promise, not only for the treatment of spinal cord injury, but for multiple sclerosis and stroke. When the...

The most celebrated American ballerina of her generation, Suzanne Farrell was a young student from Cincinnati when, at age 15, she first auditioned for the legendary choreographer George Balanchine. She danced a section of Glazunov's The Seasons, humming her own accompaniment, and the...

President Clinton and Bono join in a unique conversation with 200 students from around the world, moderated by broadcast journalist Sam Donaldson. William Jefferson Clinton was the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected to two full terms in office. During the Clinton...

Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall are the producers of many of the most successful and best-loved motion pictures in history, including E.T., Jurassic Park. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Back to the Future series and Schindler's List. Kennedy began her career as a volunteer at a public...

A legend in the world of college basketball, Dean Smith coached the Tarheels of the University of North Carolina for 36 years. Known as "the genius of Chapel Hill" he saw his team through 11 Final Four semi-finals and led them to two national championships. Although he won fame in the...

As President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and as United States Commissioner of Education, Ernest L. Boyer (1928 - 1995) was regarded as the most influential person in American education. His grandfather William Boyer -- head of the Mission of the Brethren in...

Thomas J. Pritzker is Executive Chairman of the Board of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and the Marmon Group. He is also Chairman and CEO of The Pritzker Organization, a family merchant bank. He was born and raised in Chicago and holds an MBA and a law degree from the University of Chicago. A...

Today, Pierre Omidyar is hailed as the architect of a new age of digital commerce, but the founder of eBay, the world's largest personal online trading community, became a web entrepreneur almost by accident. In 1995, he created the prototype for an online auction site as an experiment on...

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and...

John Sculley is a former President of PepsiCo and was CEO of Apple Computer from 1983 to 1993. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business he joined Pepsi as trainee in 1967. By age 30, he was the company’s youngest marketing vice...

When Michael Dell was a freshman at the University of Texas, his parents were concerned that his entrepreneurial interests would interfere with his pre-medical studies. When they paid him a surprise visit, he rushed to hide his inventory of computer parts in a friend's room. But before long, his...

Trisha Yearwood has been hailed as the premier pop-country interpreter of her generation. From the small town of Monticello, Georgia, she moved to Nashville at age 20 and took a job as a receptionist in a record company while recording songwriters' demo tapes for $10 a song. After six years of...

Michael Crichton (1942 - 2008) was a literary phenomenon. He sold his first article to The New York Times when he was only 14, and worked his way through Harvard Medical School writing detective stories. He struck gold with his 1969 bestseller The Andromeda Strain, a taut thriller, replete...

A devout Muslim, Shirin Ebadi has long argued for an interpretation of Islamic law consistent with democracy and equality before the law. The first woman to serve as a judge in Iran, she was President of the City Court of Tehran from 1971 until the revolution of 1979, when the new Islamic regime...

By age 23, John Lewis was already recognized as one of the principal leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr. The son of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, he led his first demonstrations while studying theology in Nashville, Tennessee. As Chairman of the...

Richard Leakey won fame as a paleoanthropologist while still in his early twenties, with sensational discoveries of the fossil remains of our most ancient ancestors, but his subsequent career as an author, conservationist, government official and political activist of unyielding courage has been...

For over 60 years, Hal David (1921-2012) wrote the words America loves to sing. His career spanned the decades from the swing era to the age of hip-hop and took him from Hollywood to Broadway to Nashville. He wrote his first hit song in 1947 and continued to score hits throughout the...

In her greatest roles, Sally Field has personified the strong-willed, independent woman of the American heartland, earning Oscars for her performances as a courageous union organizer in Norma Rae and as a Depression-era widow struggling to keep the family farm in Places in the Heart....

Peter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In...

Since the discovery of the DNA molecule in the 1950s, scientists have had a rough understanding of its structure, but for almost 30 years they labored in darkness, unable to see the actual object of their study. It took Sir Aaron Klug to shine a light down this dark corridor. Drawing on...

Art Buchwald (October 20, 1925 – January 17, 2007) was one of America’s most popular humorists who “spoofed the tangled web of national politics and the muddle of modern life” as a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post. Buchwald was once described as a “Will Rogers with chutzpah.”...