“I need to get drugs on the market that impact cancer.”The desire to stop your own tragedies from happening to someone else may be a strong motivator. First, chemists like Ray zero in on their target—usually a protein, a long string of amino acids coiled and folded upon itself. “There was a large team of chemists, a large team of biologists, thousands of molecules made, and no real progress,” he said. At each stage, for reasons few people understand and fewer can predict, great rafts of drugs drop out. When you meet drug hunters, you might ask them, cautiously, tenderly, if they’ve ever had a drug make it.