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This article outlines the conceptual framework for a new science focused on heroism, using multiple perspectives to generate a science that is explicitly in service to humanity. The role of heroism as a case study for deviant interdisciplinarity, heroism science as story telling and story revising, and its impacts for research and communities are considered. The primary concern of the deviant agenda of heroism science is the unity of knowledge, and the testability of narrative driven scientific inquiry. In this agenda, science as 'episteme' and heroism are unified in their core epistemic function. Heroism science is posited as a prime candidate for promoting science as enabler for improving the world, based on Hefner's (2010) concept of embodied science, and a non-linear, open and participatory model of science. Contemporary heroism research trends across the disciplines are mapped in a preliminary taxonomy of peak, emerging and low sub-fields of research activity. Heroism science is defined as a nascent multiple disciplinary field which seeks to reconceptualise heroism and its correlates through a close examination of the origins, types and processes of these interrelated phenomena.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate heroism as an embodied system of leadership and well-being. Heroic leadership is presented as a baseline for sustainable futures and global health. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents an embodied reading of heroic leadership and its sustainable development across five stages. It outlines its core functions, its grounding in self-leadership through physical and mental trauma and its holistic benefits, resulting in the development of the Heroic Leadership Embodiment and Sustainable Development (HLESD) model. The efficacy of HLESD is demonstrated in an empirical case study of heroism promotion and education: the Hero Construction Company and the Heroic Imagination Project. Findings Heroic leadership is revealed as an emergent, dynamic and distributed form of sustainable development. Research limitations/implications This paper demonstrates the critical connections between heroism, sustainability, embodied leadership and well-being and how they stand to benefit from each other, individuals and communities at large. Social implications The implementation of HLESD in educational, counselling and broader contexts in consultation with a wide range of professionals stands to offer significant benefits to pedagogies, clinical practice, holistic therapies and twenty-first-century societies, at both the community and policy level. Originality/value The emerging field of heroism science and the use of heroic leadership as an interdisciplinary tool is a novel approach to well-being, which holds immense potential for the imagining and fostering of sustainable personal and collective futures.

The radical entry of heroism research into scientific inquiry presents interesting challenges and possibilities for the study of heroism and the human condition more broadly. This "final frontier" of the enduring phenomenon of heroism stands to offer remarkable, unprecedented, and controversial advances in our understanding of heroic and human behaviour. Is a genetic basis for heroism a real possibility? If so, what would its impacts be? Advances in genomics and increased interest in the fields of epigenetics and neuroplasticity might hold the key to its discovery. This article considers some of the leading emerging research in global health genomics and speculations in the scientific study of heroism, and its potential interrelationship with genetic and epigenetic well-being.