Sharon Begley joined Newsweek in 1977, one week after graduating from Yale, and spent roughly 25 years there becoming one of America’s most admired science writers. Over a 43-year career she also wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and STAT, and published books on neuroscience and brain plasticity; she died of lung cancer in January 2021, aged 64. Colleagues remembered her gift for making hard science vivid — a gift that, in her very first year on the job, produced a sentence the world has spent five decades giving to somebody else.