Born on July 4, 2010

The gerontologist who coined "ageism" in 1968 died at 83, still working full-time. Robert Neil Butler had spent four decades fighting the discrimination he'd named—the systematic stereotyping of older people that he witnessed as a young doctor watching nursing homes warehouse the elderly. He won a Pulitzer in 1976 for his book arguing that aging minds stay sharp, directly challenging medical dogma. Founded the first geriatrics department at Mount Sinai. And kept his own hospital rounds until weeks before his death. The man who proved old age wasn't decline never actually retired.

The CIA tried to kill him with a car bomb in 1985, killed eighty others instead, and missed him entirely. Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah survived that, founded hospitals and schools across Lebanon's Shi'a communities, and became one of the most influential clerics in the Middle East—despite Western intelligence agencies calling him Hezbollah's spiritual guide, a label he repeatedly denied. He died of internal bleeding at seventy-five in Beirut. Behind him: a network of orphanages, medical clinics, and fatwas that permitted women to defend themselves violently against abusive husbands. The man Washington tried to erase built institutions that outlasted the blast.