In 1941, the Army needed to understand an old enemy well enough to stop it before it tore through mobilizing training camps.

Dr. Sara Branham was the expert they needed. She'd built the framework herself, one isolated strain at a time.

image credit: National Library of Medicine

In 1918, a government dairy bacteriologist published a paper connecting two organisms that the field had classified as entirely unrelated, and proposed that cow's milk was a vector for a debilitating human disease.

Alice Evans was dismissed for a decade. She spent twenty-three years living inside the illness she had correctly identified while the evidence accumulated, undeniably, in her direction.

image credit: Library of Congress, National Photo Company Collection