Even as a young American medical student, Roger Berry was nothing if not resourceful. To pay for his one-way transatlantic passage to take up a hospital position in Oxford, he restored and sold a 1954 Jaguar saloon that had been written off. He even took the weekend night shift of a breakdown tow-truck service, which meant that he had full use of the garage and car parts at trade rates. Later he was part of a “maverick” team of oncologists that worked on early non-surgical methods to tackle tumours in Britain. He acquired for his research a sample of californium-252, a neutron-emitting radioactive isotope, from Berkeley University in California, described as “tricky stuff to handle” by a colleague.

Source: The Times May 08, 2018 22:52 UTC