Who do you think is the most courageous person or group of people in history?

Mine are probably Anatoli Dyathlov, Sasha Yuvchenko and Boris Stolyarchuk. They were working in Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 on the night of the accident. They suffered huge amounts of radiation (Sasha absorbed 4.1Sv of radiation; a normal person absorbs under 0.0025Sv of radiation per year).

The effect of the radiation was immense. Whenever someone pulled the sheets off Sasha's bed, a black cloud of his dead skin would rise into the air. Within one year of the accident he had 19 operations for abnormal skin growths. He had microsurgery in Berlin to transplant blood vessels from his leg to his severely damaged shoulder.

All three of them survived despite the radiation and the odds. Of the three, only two are still alive today. Anatoli Dyathlov died in 1995 from a fatal heart attack. Many people consider him to be the cause of the accident.

"Of course, I have to be careful now. For example, I can drive a car, but I can't do any repairs. I can't touch oil or petrol. There are other things, but you get used to them. You learn to live with them. You have to."
--Sasha Yuvchenko (2004)