On July 26, 2019, Ray Salemme, an expert in X-Ray diffraction and crystallography, died of cancer.
“I knew of his illness, but not in detail,” says Charlie Carter, only one of only two people in our class – the other is Bob Fairclough – who truly understand what Ray was doing because they’re also working in the same field. “I had written to check up on how he was doing, as I had not heard from him for about six weeks, and wrote the day after he had died. Ray was a force of nature; a massive intellect driven by consuming curiosity and far-reaching ingenuity. He was a very important intellectual influence on me throughout his life, from the moment he recruited me to join the crystallographic laboratory of Joseph Kraut at UCSD to very recent and in-depth discussions of how protein machines work.”
“Ray was a gracious individual and obviously quite a productive scientist,” agrees Bob. “His career explored and exploited all aspects of what in our lifetime was developing in X-ray and computer technologies that could be usefully employed for human understanding and for new therapeutic products for human disease ranging from cardiac dysfunction to cancer. The human race has lost a marvelous individual.”