The half-century-long, multigenerational study of over 280,000 nurses has helped shape our understanding of how lifestyle factors affect health and disease—and it’s still going strong today.

Gene therapy is a revolutionary field of medicine that has the potential to cure genetic diseases—but after some adverse events in early clinical trials, it was broadly deemed too risky to pursue further. Dr. Stephanie Cherqui didn’t let this skepticism scare her; her vision for the potential of gene therapy allowed her to defy these setbacks and push through the barrier to bring gene therapy for Cystinosis, a rare genetic disease, from bench to bedside.

When Patsy Catsos graduated college in the mid-1980s, she was the first person hired into a new diet and breast cancer research study funded by the National Institute of Health. She was excited. A position like this would give her an outsized ability to influence the project, a rare opportunity for an entry-level dietician. She even helped hire her boss for the project.