Edith Cannon was born in New York City and earned her B.A. from McGill in 1948. In the summer of 1947 she participated in the first "Beaver Brigade" organized by the Canadian Committee of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, with the assistance of youth organizations and trade unions. The Brigade toured a number of countries in western and eastern Europe, participated in a youth Festival in Prague, and worked on reconstruction projects in Yugoslavia.

Antonio Cantero was born on November 23, 1903, in Ofena, Italy. He graduated from McGill University with a degree in medicine in 1927, and went on to become a pioneer in gastroenterology. He was a cancer researcher associated with the Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal.

In 1947, he co-founded the Montreal Cancer Institute with Dr. Louis-Charles Simard, a pathologist from Notre-Dame Hospital. The Institute collaborated with Notre-Dame Hospital and the University of Montreal to carry out its mission.

He was the director of research laboratories at the Montreal Cancer Institute by 1960. His wife, Fernande Kent, was also the VP of the Canadian Cancer Society Quebec Division in 1957.

Hortense Douglas Cantlie was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1901. From 1909 to 1918 she attended Miss Edgar and Miss Cramp’s School in Montreal. In 1921 she studied charcoal drawing from casts at the Montreal Art Association and in 1922 took art classes in New York. From 1925 to 1926 she studied at John Hopkins University under Max Brödel, where she obtained a certificate in Art as Applied to Medicine in 1926. From 1924 to 1935 Hortense Cantlie worked as a medical illustrator, principally at the Montreal General Hospital. Copies of her illustrations were used in medical articles and books, including material published by Dr. Wilder Penfield. The most famous illustrations are somatic and motor homunculi. She designed and made a brain model with convolutions represented as babies - the Brain Children - for the dedication plaque of the McConnell Wing at the Montreal Neurological Hospital (1953). After her marriage to Stephen Cantlie in 1935, she did few medical illustrations. Hortense Cantlie died in 1979.

He was a Spanish entomologist.