In 1996, Beth Jacobson, a lawyer in private practice, was watching her husband, a 35-year-old cardiologist, dying from the blood cancer called multiple myeloma. She spent her nights reading medical journals at his bedside and her days calling doctors. One Saturday night, Judah Folkman, the famed Harvard cancer researcher, returned her call, and they came up with the idea of trying thalidomide, famed for causing birth defects as an anti-nausea drug, but also then being tested to treat leprosy.

Beth Jacobson pushed doctors to try this novel approach in an effort to save her dying husband. Thalidomide didn't help her husband, who soon died. But the next patient who got it had an amazing response. It was her husband's doctor, Bart Barlogie of the University of Arkansas Medical Center, who ran the first clinical trial to show thalidomide's effect in multiple myeloma. The results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1999. Now thalidomide (brand name: Thalomid) and a related drug, Revlimid, are routinely used for multiple myeloma treatment.

Beth Jacobson's idea changed the lives of thousands of patients.