Prof. Dr. med. Werner Audretsch

“Medicine is a bit like Formula 1: You have to make sure to start in the best team”

Instead of retirement: Professor Werner Audretsch, age 70, started a new venture to fight breast cancer. The internationally renowned surgeon and éminence grise founded an interdisciplinary center for breast cancer – Verein zur Förderung der Senologie.

After 40 years in the operating theater, he started a counselling center for patients: “Zebra”. An independent organization to provide concerned women with invaluable support to deal with all disease-related issues. “Zebra” provides information and advice, and a platform for experiences to be shared, for mental as well as emotional support. Dr. Audretsch, the optimist, is convinced:“Breast cancer can be cured.” The team at Zebra is made up entirely of women – and they are quite clearly the trailblazers in this area. 

Photo: source office Dr. Audretsch

Robert Wilson

“An artist recreates history, not like a historian, but as a poet.”

Since the late 1960s, Robert Wilson’s productions have decisively shaped the face of theater and opera alike. With his signature use of light, his exploration of the structure of a simple movement, and the classical rigor of his scenic and furniture design, Wilson has continuously articulated the force and originality of his vision. Wilson’s close ties and collaborations with leading artists, writers, and musicians continue to fascinate audiences worldwide.

After being educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Wilson founded the New York‐based performance collective “The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds” in the mid‐1960s, and developed his first signature works, including Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974‐1975). Together with Philip Glass he wrote the seminal opera Einstein on the Beach (1976).

Wilson’s artistic collaborators include many writers and musicians such as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed and Jessye Norman. He has also left his imprint on masterworks such as Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Debussy’s Pelléas et Melisande, Brecht/Weill’s Three Penny Opera, Goethe’s Faust, Jean de la Fontaine’s Fables and Homer’s Odyssey.

Wilson has been honored with numerous awards for excellence, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, two Premio Ubu awards, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and an Olivier Award. Wilson is the founder and Artistic Director of The Watermill Center, a laboratory for the Arts in Water Mill, New York.

Photo: Lucie Jansch

Courtney Ross

„ALL CHILDREN LEARN. YOU JUST HAVE TO
INVEST IN THEM.“

Courtney is an attractive woman with the well-styled blond mane of a New York benefactress. She has great resolve and has graciously used her wealth to bring opportunity and education to the masses, regardless of the challenges she has confronted along the way. Her dear motto: Know Thyself In Order To Serve.

In 1991, Courtney and Steven J. Ross founded the Ross School in East Hampton. They recognized that preparing students to meet the challenges of an increasingly connected and rapidly changing world requires innovative models to transform education. Starting with only three children, the Ross School currently serves about 420 students.

The children take music, dance and Chinese, and start the day performing either yoga or Tai chi. However, this isn’t a tiny private school, but a charter school in the East Village, and most of its 420 students are black or Hispanic and come from poor families.

Photo: Ryan McCune/PatrickMcMullan.com

Prof. Dr. Herrmann F. Sailer

„THE MOST VALUABLE PAYMENT FOR ALL THE WORK IS THE HAPPY AND SATISFIED SMILE ON THE FACE OF AN OPERATED CHILD.”

Professor Hermann F. Sailer is one of the world’s most experienced and respected experts in facial and jaw surgery. In Sailer’s famous private clinic in Zürich, Switzerland you will invariably meet the “who’s who” of the entertainment, beauty and business worlds.

Next to his glamorous appearance Prof. Sailer has a deeply human and modest side. In 2000 – inspired by his wife Erika Sailer – he founded “Cleft-Children International” (CCI), a foundation to help disfigured children escape from a terrible destiny that can easily otherwise impede their breathing, eating and sometimes speaking.

To date, in India, in the first five Cleft centers, no less than 88,000 surgical interventions have been successfully carried out, and more than 420 doctors and nurses trained. Today the organization runs centers in Mangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras), and Kolkata (Calcutta) as well as in Lahore, Pakistan, in Bethlehem, Palestine, and in Kitale, Kenya.

In 2009 the Cleft School Project was started. Currently, over 90 children which have undergone surgical treatment through Prof. Sailer’s program also receive an education.

Photo: Sailer clinic

Kristine McDivitt Tompkins

“WE GREW UP IN U.S. NATIONAL PARKS –
CLIMBING, HIKING, YOU NAME IT.”

It’s difficult to describe someone like Kristine Tompkins. A pioneer in the outdoor industry during her time as CEO of Patagonia and one of the preeminent conservationists of the last 30 years, her story is one of which most could only dream.

Born on a ranch in Southern California in 1950, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins considered the outdoors a precious gift from an early age.

At the age of 15, she met Yvon Chouinard, who offered her a summer job. After college, she returned to work for him full-time and helped him launch Patagonia, Inc. During her 20 years as CEO, Kristine transformed the company into a titan of the outdoor industry and also led the growing sustainable business movement.

In the early 1990s, Kristine retired from Patagonia and moved to South America to live with Doug Tompkins, a long-time friend and a companion of Chouinard. The two soon married and over the next 25 years would become a formidable force in the global conservation movement. Kristine continues to preserve land in Chile and Argentina after the untimely death of her husband and conservation partner, Doug, in 2015.

Photo: source Tompkins Foundation

Douglas Tompkins

“I DON‘T WANT TO SEE ANYTHING
NATURAL GET HURT.”

Doug, the business man, founded the North Face company with a partner in 1966 in San Francisco as a small skiing and backpacking shop. In 1968, he and his then wife Susie Tompkins Buell founded the fashion brand Esprit together.

Doug, the conservationist, founded the environmental charity organization Foundation for Deep Ecology in 1990 and the Conservation Land Trust, an organization to conserve land in Chile and Argentina, in 1992. With his second wife Kristine McDivitt Tompkins the couple was able to save an incomprehensibly large swathe of land and convert it into national parks.

Doug started out as an outdoor adventurer and entrepreneur. He was a passionate advocate of the environment and a free spirit. His ideas and example prompted us to establish the JAF Foundation.

On December 8, 2015, Doug was kayaking with five others on General Carrera Lake in southern Chile when strong waves caused their kayaks to capsize. He was flown, by helicopter, to a hospital where he died hours later from severe hypothermia.

Photo: CC-BY-SA-2.0. Sam Beebe