"There are substantive issues to deal with - whether or not Ali Abdullah Saleh or General Mohsen remain - that will require compromise on the structure of the state, on resource sharing, and so on, " she says, primary amongst them the issue of Southerners who feel they got a raw deal from the unification of the country in 1990.

BBC: Yemen: A rare 'success' 'at risk

Some revolutionaries were slighted by the scientific establishments of their time--like Rosalind Franklin's exclusion from sharing in the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Described by her peers as a "genius, " she exposed herself to massive amounts of radiation to try to get the best possible X-ray photograph of a strand of DNA, dying of cancer at 37.

FORBES: Fifteen People Who Changed The World