Temple Grandin

When Temple Grandin was two, doctors told her parents that she had brain damage. She did not speak until she was nearly four, and her mother was advised to place her in an institution. Her mother refused, hired a speech therapist and kept her at home. Grandin grew up to become one of the most influential animal scientists in the world, and one of the first people to describe autism from the inside.

She was born on August 29, 1947, in Boston, Massachusetts, at 2:30 in the afternoon, the time on her birth certificate. Early Virgo holds her Sun, with Mercury and Venus also in Virgo, all three in the ninth house, which governs higher education, teaching and the sharing of knowledge. Virgo is analytical, precise and practical, and in traditional astrology it is associated with small animals and with useful, careful work. Three Virgo planets in the ninth house describe a scientist and teacher whose life's work combines precision, animals and education.

As a teenager, while visiting her aunt's ranch in Arizona, she watched cattle being held in a squeeze chute and noticed that the pressure seemed to calm them. She built her own version, a "squeeze machine," to calm her anxiety, a device later studied as a therapeutic tool. That insight, that she could understand animals' fear and comfort, became the center of her career.

Her Moon is in Aquarius in the second house. Aquarius belongs to original thinkers who see the world differently from everyone around them. Grandin describes herself as a visual thinker, someone who thinks in detailed pictures rather than words, and her 1995 book, Thinking in Pictures, helped change how people understood autism. She has argued that the world needs minds that work differently.

Sagittarius is her rising sign, which gives a direct, plain-spoken and teacherly manner. Grandin is famously blunt, wears Western shirts and speaks without social filter, and she has given lectures around the world.

She earned degrees from Franklin Pierce College and Arizona State University, and a doctorate in animal science from the University of Illinois in 1989. Her designs for curved cattle chutes and humane handling systems, which reduce animals' stress by working with their natural behavior, are used to handle a large share of the cattle in North America. For decades she has been a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Mars and Uranus both sit in her seventh house, the area of one-on-one relationships. Uranus there suggests unconventional relationships, and Grandin has said that her work, rather than romance, has been her life. Neptune in Libra, in her tenth house, points to a public image that became something of an inspiration for others.

In 2010 HBO released Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes, which won seven Emmy Awards, and Time named her one of the most influential people in the world. The three Virgo planets in the ninth house describe her exactly: a precise mind, a love of animals and a lifetime of teaching.