Gertrude Elion

Born to Jewish immigrants in New York and barred from many research jobs because she was a woman, Elion never earned a doctorate yet became one of the great drug designers. With George Hitchings she pioneered rational drug design — building medicines by understanding the biochemical differences between healthy and diseased cells rather than by trial and error. Her approach produced treatments for childhood leukemia, gout, malaria, organ-transplant rejection and viral infection, and she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.