When Desmond Tutu became General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, he used his pulpit to decry the apartheid system of racial segregation. The South African government revoked his passport to prevent him from traveling, but Bishop Tutu refused to be silenced. International...

Dr. Walter E. Massey has enjoyed a uniquely varied career at the highest levels of science, education, business and public administration. A precocious student from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he graduated from Atlanta's Morehouse College in 1958, and earned his doctorate in physics from...

Barry Diller is one of the most successful media and entertainment entrepreneurs of our times. As Vice President of Development at ABC Television in the 1960s, he pioneered the Movie of the Week and miniseries formats. He led the struggling network to dominance with popular programs such...

Beginning in the 1950s, the entrepreneur and engineer Robert A. Pritzker (1926 - 2011) built the Marmon Group into a multi-billion dollar empire of manufacturing and service companies. The son of a prominent Chicago family of lawyers and entrepreneurs, Robert Pritzker was also a major...

Edward Lewis is the publisher of Essence magazine and the Chairman and CEO of Essence Communications, Inc. An All-City fullback at New York's DeWitt Clinton High School, he attended the University of New Mexico on a football scholarship. Inspired by a sympathetic professor, he earned...

The pioneering conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy awakened the world to the threat posed to life on earth by the loss of irreplaceable natural habitat, and has devised ingenious strategies to apply third world debt to the preservation of endangered ecosystems. Dr. Lovejoy's studies of...

George F. Bass is the acknowledged father of underwater archeology. His excavations of shipwrecks around the world have revolutionized archeology and profoundly influenced our understanding of the earliest ages of civilization. He was a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of...

The career of Emmylou Harris has spanned the wide open range of American music. Whether singing traditional ballads, country classics, or her own highly personal compositions, her achingly pure voice and emotional commitment to her music have remained constant. She first won national...

Much of the technology we take for granted today, from mobile phone reception to MRI scanning, would be unthinkable without discoveries made by Alexei Abrikosov in Russia half a century ago. In the early 1950s, Abrikosov was one of only a handful of scientists around the world studying the...

In the 1970s, Lech Walesa was an electrician at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. He was fired for his outspoken criticism of the Communist government, but when his old co-workers went on strike in 1980, Walesa scaled the shipyard fence to join them. The courage exemplified by this act...

One of the most acclaimed singers of our time, Kathleen Battle's glorious voice and unique artistry have captivated audiences in concert halls and opera houses around the world. This radiant soprano has earned many honors for her performances and recordings, including Grammy Awards for...

The protean musician and impresario Quincy Jones has been dubbed "a master inventor of musical hybrids," shuffling pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African and Brazilian music into unique and extraordinary musical syntheses. He began his career as a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and...

Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Carol Greider are pioneers in the study of telomeres, segments of DNA that help determine the number of times a cell divides, an event that affects the life span and health of cells, and the development of some cancers. Carol Greider was a graduate student of Dr....

Maya Lin is the world-renowned architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and one of the most important public artists of our times. Her parents fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949, eventually settling in Athens, Ohio, where both became professors at Ohio...

As a boy growing up in India, Vinod Khosla dreamed of becoming a new technology entrepreneur, although his family had no business or technology connections. After graduating with a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, he moved to the United...

Rosa Parks, the "mother of the civil rights movement" was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century. Mrs. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her...

Most scientists would consider a Nobel Prize the crowning achievement of a life's work; Frederick Sanger has won this honor not once, but twice. He received his first Nobel in 1958 for successfully determining the exact sequence of the 51 amino acids that make up a molecule of insulin. The...

Hailed as the father of the biotechnology industry, the technologist and entrepreneur George Rathmann was the founding CEO of Amgen Inc. A chemist with a Ph.D. from Princeton, he worked for 21 years at 3M, where he helped develop Scotchgard, among other products. In 1980, he left a secure...

This podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2000 gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona, features two outstanding space scientists, Story Musgrave and Donna Shirley. Story Musgrave grew up on a farm in Western Massachusetts, with what he calls "an extraordinarily dysfunctional...

For 25 years, Lute Olson was head coach of the University of Arizona Wildcats, the most successful coach in Arizona's basketball history. Robert Luther ("Lute") Olson was born on a farm in North Dakota. His father died when he was only five, and he lost a brother only six months later. His...

As a member of a renowned international banking family, the financier Jacob Rothschild inherited a unique position in the world, he has used this position to preserve the world's cultural inheritance. As Chairman of Trustees of Britain's National Gallery from 1985 to 1991, Lord Rothschild...

Dr. Kenan Sahin is a highly successful entrepreneur, as well as a scientist, educator and philanthropist. Born in Turkey, Sahin earned science and management degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s. His doctoral research led to worldwide patents in areas...

Sir John Vane (1927 - 2004) received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries that reach into the medicine cabinet of almost every home. For generations, we have known that aspirin relieves pain, but how and why it works remained a baffling mystery until 1971, when Dr. Vane...

For 23 years, J. Carter Brown (1934 - 2002) served as Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., building one of the world's greatest collections of art, and keeping it available to the public, free of charge. Brown was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where his family...

In 2000, Dr. John L. Hennessy was chosen to serve as the tenth President of Stanford University. A computer scientist and entrepreneur as well as educator, Hennessy is responsible for crucial innovations in computer programming that our present information age possible. John Hennesy's...

Author Tracy Kidder received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his penetrating history of the microprocessor revolution, Soul of a New Machine. A Harvard graduate and Vietnam veteran, Tracy Kidder first won acclaim for his ability to make the events of everyday life an...

José Ramos-Horta was born in Dili, East Timor, when the Pacific island territory was still a colony of Portugal. For years, he worked to achieve his country's independence and was forced into exile for two years. No sooner had East Timor become independent in 1975, when neighboring...

Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For over 30 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating that...

Few figures in the history of diplomacy have had as large an impact on world history as Dr. Henry Kissinger. As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger is generally credited with crafting the policy of detente with the Soviet Union and effecting the historic opening...

In 1985, Michael S. Brown, M.D., won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, as well as the Albert Lasker Basic Research Award, the highest honor in American medicine. Dr. Brown, along with his colleague, Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, was honored discovering the basic mechanisms controlling cholesterol...

The Crown Prince of Bahrain, Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, is a passionate advocate for education in his country. In 1999, he founded the Crown Prince International Scholarship to give the most dedicated Bahraini high school graduates the opportunity to study at top international...

The son of a cantor and a school teacher, Carl C. Icahn was a medical school dropout when he began his career on wall Street in 1961. Seven years later, he founded his own securities trading firm, Icahn & Co. At first, his firm specialized in traditional arbitrage and options trading,...

The greatest fielding third baseman in the history of baseball, Brooks Robinson spent all 23 seasons of his major league career playing for the Baltimore Orioles. He was selected four times as his team's Most Valuable Player, played in 18 consecutive All-Star games, and received 16...

When Amalya Lyle Kearse was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she was the first woman and only the second African American (after Thurgood Marshall) to serve on the court. Kearse was born in Vauxhall, New Jersey, where her father was a postmaster and...

Entrepreneur extraordinaire Deacon Chiu is the Founder and Chairman of Far East Holdings, a transnational business colossus that straddles the oceans. He first arrived in British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950, fleeing the communist revolution in China. He sold his wife's jewelry to finance...

One of the greatest players in professional football history, Franco Harris was selected as the NFL's "Player of the Decade" after his 12 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers. One of the nation's top running backs at Penn State University, he was drafted in the first-round by Pittsburgh in...

No person did more to advance the surgical treatment of diseases of the heart and blood vessels than Dr. Michael DeBakey (1908 - 2008). As early as 1932, DeBakey developed components which became part of the first heart-lung machines. In 1936, he was one of the first to identify a...

From over 30 years, beginning in the 1960s, Karl Eller was the dominant figure in the outdoor advertising industry. In less than ten years, he built a small billboard company into Combined Communications Corporation, one of the largest mass media enterprises in the nation, with seven...

The American biochemist Mildred Cohn (1913 - 2009) was a trailblazer for women in science, a tireless researcher whose investigations of enzymatic processes and chemical isotopes extended the boundaries of human knowledge. Born to immigrant parents in New York City, she graduated from...

The entrepreneur and philanthropist Thomas S. Monaghan achieved enormous success as the Founder, Chairman and President of the Domino's Pizza chain, but he did not have an easy start in life. His father died when he was only four. His mother was unable to care for him alone, and Tom...

As the Co-Founder and longtime President and CEO of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Dr. Thomas F. First Jr. built a family-owned hospital into the largest hospital management company in the world. Dr. Frist comes from a family of physicians with deep roots in the state of Tennessee....

Rita Dove is one of America's best-known and most honored poets. Her collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, based on the lives of her grandparents, earned her the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was only the second African-American to win this prize. In 1993, she was appointed to a...

The astrophysicist and cosmologist George Fitzgerald Smoot III received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the measurement of microwave background radiation in the universe. A graduate of MIT, Smoot received dual bachelors' degrees in mathematics and physics, and received...

The most honored and admired theatrical designer of our times, John Napier has received Broadway's Tony Award for his set designs for Nicholas Nickleby, Cats, Starlight Express, Les Miserables and Sunset Boulevard. He has also created acclaimed settings for the New York and London...

Rudolph "Rudy" Arthur Marcus is a Canadian-born chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. A trailblazing researcher, Dr. Marcus is known for his work in many fields of theoretical chemical kinetics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for elucidating a thermodynamic and kinetic...

The co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard Company, William Hewlett (1913-2001) started the business in 1939 with his friend Stanford University engineering classmate David Packard. In 1939, they started a tiny electronics outfit in a one-car garage behind a rented home in Palo Alto. Their...

Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary...

Joel Sartore is a photographer, speaker, author, teacher, and a 20-year contributor to National Geographic magazine. His assignments have taken him to every continent and to the world's most beautiful and challenging environments, from the High Arctic to the Antarctic. In his own words, he is...

In a breathtakingly short time, songwriter Christina Perri has earned a reputation for combining infectious, memorable melodies with uncompromising descriptions of difficult emotions. Arriving in Los Angeles on her 21st birthday with one suitcase and a guitar, she struggled to find an...

Hailed as "the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world," South Africa's Athol Fugard has won international praise for creating theater of "power, glory, and majestic language." In more than 20 plays, written over six decades, he has chronicled the struggles of men and...