Courtesy of Contact Press Images

Kristen Ashburn began photographing AIDS patients in December 2000, on the first of several self-financed trips to Botswana and Zimbabwe (“Why Is AIDS Worse in Africa?” page 68). Committed to humanitarian efforts, she is now a project coordinator of Through the Eyes of Children:The Rwanda Project, a charity that teaches photography to orphans and is supported by the sale of their images. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Life, among others, and in the book A Day in the Life of Africa.


Courtesy of Helen Epstein

A molecular biologist by training, Helen Epstein, who wrote the AIDS story, once spent her days in a laboratory poking at fruit flies before realizing that people were more interesting. She traveled to Uganda to work on an AIDS vaccine but again grew frustrated. “I felt that AIDS was a bigger problem than any one scientific discipline could solve,” she says. In 1993 Epstein turned to journalism and now writes mostly about AIDS in Africa. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Courtesy of Dianne Taylor-Snow

Sy Montgomery has chased and been chased in the wild for years, yet she says few adventures have taken her as far from the civilized world as the pursuit of the goliath birdeater tarantula in French Guiana (“Stalking Spiders,” page 62). “Both its otherness and sameness strike you at once,” she says. Her book The Tarantula Scientist will be published by Houghton Mifflin in March. 

Courtesy of James Balog

The lead photographer for the tarantula story, James Balog has been traveling the world as an outdoor photographer for more than 25 years, concentrating on conservation and wildlife. His subjects vary—from elephants to flamingos and now tarantulas—yet he always manages to capture their personalities. Getting close to large spiders didn’t bother him, but he did have a run-in recently with a grizzly bear. “It was unpleasantly intense,” he says.