My father, Gerry Potter, who has died aged 63, was a medicinal chemist who dedicated his career to designing lifesaving cancer drugs. In the early 1990s, he and his colleagues at the Institute of Cancer Research in London designed the hormone therapy drug abiraterone acetate. It was patented in 1993, eventually approved in 2011 and is now one of the leading treatments of advanced prostate cancer, branded as Zytiga.
Gerry was born in Rugby, the third of six children of Joyce (nee Wilson), a housewife, and Anthony Potter, who worked in Norfolk county council’s highways department. Moving to Norwich aged six, Gerry went to St Augustine’s primary school in Costessey, and then to Wymondham college.
