A conversation with Dave Isay
“When I was a kid, I was headed to medical school,” Isay says. “Everybody in my family were doctors and for many of them it was a calling. But it wasn’t what I was meant to do, and I kind of knew that at the back of my head. One day, as I was getting ready to go to medical school, I tripped over a story that really spoke to me. I was living in New York, in Manhattan, at the time. It was a pair of people who had found their calling running a store. They were former heroin addicts dying of AIDS. This was in the late 1980s. They had decided to build a museum to addiction before they died.”