Kate Bárány: a life of science, teaching, and service.

We celebrate the lives of Michael and Kate Bárány in this issue of the Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility. Kate and Michael died within weeks of each other in 2011. Joe Chalovich has written about Michael and we write about Kate. As emphasized by Joe, Kate, and Michael were remarkable individuals who survived the Holocaust, the Hungarian revolution, and emerged from as much adversity as one might imagine to become productive scientists, educators, citizens, and symbols of the durability of the human spirit. They present their own story in an essay (Bárány and Bárány 2000) published in a monograph "Selected Topics in the History of Biochemistry." Rather than repeating much of the list of scientific achievements chronicled in these papers, we focus here on Kate, especially in her role as an individual and partner in science, while at the same time being an accomplished teacher, and a champion of women in science.