A new drug usually starts with a tragedy.
Peter Ray knows that. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop. She didn’t feel well.
Doctors in Cape Town diagnosed her with cancer. Ray remembers going to her radiation treatments with her, the hospital rooms, the colostomy bags. She loved the beach, loved to walk