Gertrude Elion

Origins and early life

Gertrude Belle Elion was born in New York City on 23 January 1918, the daughter of Jewish immigrants: her father, Robert, a dentist from a long line of rabbis, came from Lithuania, and her mother, Bertha Cohen, from Russian-ruled Poland. She said her parents, like other immigrant Jews, saw education as the one way to success, and when her father was ruined in the crash of 1929, the free tuition of Hunter College let her study at all.

Her grandfather's death from cancer made her choose chemistry, and she graduated from Hunter summa cum laude in 1937, only to find laboratory jobs closed to women.

Work and career

She worked unpaid in a laboratory, taught in high schools and earned a master's degree in chemistry at New York University in 1941, and in 1944 George Hitchings hired her as his assistant at Burroughs Wellcome. Instead of trial and error, they designed molecules that exploit the biochemical differences between normal cells and cancer cells, bacteria or viruses, and in 1950 she synthesised 6-mercaptopurine, which with later drugs came to cure most children with leukaemia.

The same approach gave azathioprine, which made kidney transplants between unrelated people possible, allopurinol for gout, pyrimethamine for malaria and acyclovir, the first selective treatment for herpes. She headed the department of experimental therapy from 1967 to 1983 without ever taking a doctorate, and the year after she stepped down her laboratory, using her methods, produced AZT, the first drug widely used against AIDS.

Recognition

The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by James Black, Elion and Hitchings “for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment”, and in 1991 she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. She never married after her fiancé died in 1941, and she died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on 21 February 1999.