Brenda Milner

Brenda Milner was born in Manchester, England, to a Welsh mother and an English father. Her father, Samuel Langford, was a music critic, and her mother, Dorothy, was a singer. While neither parent was Jewish, one of her paternal grandparents was of Jewish descent, which is just enough to get her a cameo here. She spent her formative years navigating a world that probably didn't know a spatial working memory deficit from a hole in the ground.

After fleeing England during WWII to avoid the Blitz, Milner landed in Canada, where she began her illustrious career at McGill University. There, she teamed up with neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield and patient H.M. (Henry Molaison), a collaboration that would make them both famous in neurological circles, albeit for vastly different reasons. Her work with H.M. defined the hippocampus's role in forming new long-term memories, essentially turning neuroscience on its head.

Milner's contributions have earned her a dizzying array of awards and accolades, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. At over 100 years old, she was still publishing papers, proving that her own memory for groundbreaking research remained perfectly intact. She's less a scientist and more a living monument to the enduring power of a really good brain.