13. Bruce Stillman

It’s fitting that in a place credited with helping humans unravel the strands of DNA that the search for knowledge continues today into the furthest frontiers of molecular biology, neuroscience, genetics, and cancer. Dr. Bruce Stillman, who still finds time to conduct his own experiments and teach the next generation of researchers, runs one of the most important labs in the country, if not the world, right there on the border of Nassau and Suffolk counties. He knows science matters, and that’s why he was one of the founding members of Accelerate Long Island, a far-reaching partnership of Cold Spring Harbor Lab, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Stony Brook University dedicated to fostering high-tech development here. In New York City, Stillman joined with others to found the New York Genome Center, an international consortium of academic, medical and industry leaders. This native of Melbourne, Australia, began his career at the lab in 1979 as a post-doctoral fellow and has been an influential leader there since 1994. Now he’s pushing plans to open a $75 million center in order to bring the fruits of his colleagues’ therapeutic research to market when they’re ripe, rather than waiting for Big Pharma to decide when it’s harvest time. Now, if only the National Institutes of Health could convince Congress to increase its federal funding, Stillman’s dreams would be answered—and the nightmares of disease and illness plaguing humankind would potentially end.