better
H
E A
L T H
n a n c y b r i n k e r ,
d i a j T t y :f e m
AS SHE FOUGHT
with all her strength against breast cancer,
Susan Komen made her little sister a proposition. “When I get better,
I want us to really work on curing this disease,” she said to Nancy, as
the two held one another on a sofa in their parents’ Illinois home. A
month later, she died.
After Susan’s death in
1980
at the age of
36
, Nancy Brinker acted on
her sister’s proposition and went on to found Susan G. Komen for the
Cure, now the largest breast cancer charity in the world.
Initially, Nancy approached several charitable groups for money,
but in the early
1980
s breast cancer wasn’t discussed in public or
given a high priority in oncology research. So she gathered
20
women
in her living room and asked for their help. They raised
$1
million that
first year. Since then, the total has topped Si billion.
Along the way, Nancy also served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary
and, in
2008
, was named one
o f Tim e
magazine’s top
100
most
influential people in the world. Accolades, however, aren’t the real
reward for how she has spent her adult life.
“I was at a restaurant and a man sought me out to tell me I had
saved his wife’s life,” says Nancy, who has battled breast cancer
herself. “That’s really powerful. How can you equate that with
anything? This is what my life is going to be about.”
IN
1964
,
for a middle-school girl to be interested in math and
science was considered downright odd. Sally Ride didn’t care. “I
made a conscious decision that it was OK for me to want to be a
scientist even though there weren’t many women scientists or
engineers out there at the time I was growing up,” says Sally, the first
American female astronaut. She entered outer space in
1983
on
board the space shuttle Challenger. “I had to feel good about that
even though that would make me different from my friends.”
Sally says she’s not sure where she got the courage to buck
convention at such a young age, but her parents always encouraged
her to shoot for the stars. “It would have been easy for them to steer
me toward a more conventional role,” says Sally, who earned a Ph.D.
in physics from Stanford University.
These days, Sally dedicates herself to making science cool and
fun, especially for girls, through a company she founded in 2001
called Sally Ride Science. “Research shows as many girls as boys
like science in the third and fourth grades, but we start losinggirls
in greater numbers in middle school,” she says. “There’s still this
stereotype that science is for geeks. I’m trying to counteract
that message.”
The largcst-ever review ofbrain function studies showed that
those who continually challenge themselves, maintain a positive
outlook, and remain socially active are the healthiest.
2 5 4 SEPTEMBER 2009
BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS
