Seventeen years ago, Dr. Mark Roth took an enormous leap into the study of suspended animation, a dormant state that can extend life under harsh conditions. He found that iodide has a unique ability to act as a continually renewable antioxidant, and it may be nature’s secret to help animals successfully reanimate after naturally dropping their metabolic rate in hibernation. Since then, his work has kicked off clinical trials that showed iodide can protect patients from trauma damage by safely reanimating dying tissue.

If you removed the DNA from a human cell, unraveled it and laid it end to end, the whole thing would stretch about 7 feet. Dr. Toshio "Toshi" Tsukiyama has spent his career studying how all that genetic material gets squeezed into a microscopic cell. His work improves our understanding of how normal cells function and may also be a step toward improving cancer therapies: DNA packaging plays a key role in cell sleep, or quiescence, a process that also drives cancer cells’ ability to “hide” and reemerge years after treatment.