Rational drug design

Drugs used to be found by testing thousands of compounds and hoping. Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings did the opposite: they studied how a diseased cell differs from a healthy one in the way it builds DNA, and then designed a molecule to exploit exactly that difference. Out of that method came the first drugs against childhood leukaemia, the drug that made organ transplants possible, treatments for gout and malaria, and the first antiviral, acyclovir. Elion — a Jewish New Yorker who was turned away from graduate school and paid laboratories for years because she was a woman — shared the Nobel Prize in 1988. She never held a doctorate.

Part of “The Gifts of the Jews” — verified Jewish contributions to the world, with sources.