Our knowledge of toxic substances in plants, in fungi, and of aromatic and other chemicals that cause cancer owes much to the pioneering work of Regina Schoental.

As a pioneering physician, biostatistician, and demographer, Mindel Cherniack Sheps was acutely aware of the role science could play as a powerful social force. She taught that peace, social justice, and science were inextricably bound; humanism in any field must be based on social equity and knowledge.

Born in a Russian shtetl, Bertha Kaplan Spector became a bacteriologist whose authoritative research helped to control an epidemic of amebic dysentery during the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair. Her work contributed to a better understanding of the disease, as well as to new standards of hygiene.

Dismissed from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1934 for being a Jew, a woman, and a foreigner, Estera Tenenbaum went on to become a distinguished cell and virus scientist. Over the course of her career she held research and teaching positions at Hebrew University and participated in groundbreaking research at the California Institute of Technology.

Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch combined embryology and genetics to form a new discipline, developmental genetics, a science that investigates the genetic mechanisms of development. For over sixty years, Waelsch made fundamental discoveries in mammalian development and cancer research.

Mayana Zatz is one of the pioneers of human and medical genetics in Brazil. In 1981 she founded the Brazilian Muscular Dystrophy Association, to help the poorest population of patients. She has worked on the Zika congenital syndrome and on cancer and was very involved with the Brazilian Congress’s approval of a bill allowing human embryonic stem cell research.