Gertrude B. Elion

Gertrude Elion grew up in New York City, the daughter of a Lithuanian-Jewish dentist and a Polish-Jewish immigrant mother. She was fifteen when her grandfather died of stomach cancer, and she later said the disease decided her on chemistry. She graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1937, tuition-free because of her grades, but all fifteen of her graduate fellowship applications were turned down — no laboratory would fund a woman. She earned a master's degree at night from New York University while teaching high school by day, and spent years cycling through unpaid lab work before the wartime labor shortage opened a door: in 1944, Burroughs Wellcome hired her as a research assistant to the chemist George Hitchings.

Working under Hitchings, Elion pioneered what became known as rational drug design: instead of testing chemicals at random, she studied the biochemical differences between healthy cells and the cells of cancers, bacteria, and viruses, then built molecules to exploit them. The method produced a four-decade pipeline — 6-mercaptopurine in 1951, which put childhood leukemia into remission for the first time, azathioprine in 1957, which made organ transplantation medically viable, allopurinol for gout in 1963, and acyclovir in 1977, the first drug that attacked a virus without poisoning the patient along with it. The principles behind acyclovir directly informed her colleagues' development of AZT, the first effective HIV treatment. She shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Hitchings and Sir James Black, without ever holding a doctorate.

The Nobel came without the degree that would normally accompany it. Elion enrolled part-time in a doctoral program at Brooklyn Polytechnic while working full-time, and after two years her dean forced her to choose between finishing the PhD and keeping her job — she kept the job, and never went back. The cost was personal too. In 1941 her fiance, Leonard Cantor, died of bacterial endocarditis, a heart infection that penicillin would soon have cured. She never married. Decades later, as head of her own department at Burroughs Wellcome, colleagues noted that she pushed the researchers under her toward publication and credit she could easily have claimed for herself, a reversal of the pattern that had once cost her fifteen rejected fellowship applications.

Elion kept working after her formal retirement in 1983, holding a research professorship at Duke and staying on at Burroughs Wellcome as scientist emeritus. In 1991 she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and by the time she died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on February 21, 1999, at 81, she held more than 45 patents. The method she and Hitchings built, designing drugs to a target rather than testing chemicals at random, is now the default approach across the pharmaceutical industry. Azathioprine still underlies most organ transplants performed today, and the antiviral logic behind acyclovir shaped the AIDS drugs that followed her retirement.

Gertrude B. Elion's life against the full span of the corpus.

• 6-mercaptopurine invention
  First effective treatment for childhood leukemia 1951
• Azathioprine invention
  Made organ transplantation medically viable 1957
• Allopurinol invention
  Standard treatment for gout 1963
• Acyclovir invention
  First antiviral selective enough to spare healthy cells 1977
• Rational drug design method discovery
  Targeted disease biochemistry instead of testing chemicals at random 1950

• January 23, 1918 aged 0 Born in New York City
• 1937 aged ~19 Graduates summa cum laude from Hunter College
• 1941 aged ~23 Fiance Leonard Cantor dies of bacterial endocarditis
• 1944 aged ~26 Joins Burroughs Wellcome as research assistant to George Hitchings
• 1951 aged ~33 Synthesizes 6-mercaptopurine, later used against childhood leukemia
• 1957 aged ~39 Develops azathioprine, enabling organ transplantation
• 1977 aged ~59 Develops acyclovir, the first selective antiviral drug
• 1988 aged ~70 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• February 21, 1999 aged 81 Dies in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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