SILVER SPRING, Md. — Martine Rothblatt founded Sirius Satellite Radio from a desire to link people together. She founded United Therapeutics (Nasdaq: UTHR), which has a research and development facility in Research Triangle Park, N.C.,  from a desperation to save her daughter's life.

With no background in medicine, pharmacology or biology, she was determined to find treatments for the disease that literally took the breath away from her young daughter Jenesis. Her success at biotech came on the heels of recognition as one of the inventors of satellite radio.

And she accomplished much of this during a time of personal transformation, undergoing a sex change in the early '90s.  Read More...