A Bronx childhood
Gertrude Belle Elion was born in New York City on January 23, 1918, on a night so cold, she later recalled, that the water pipes in the family apartment froze and burst. Her father, Robert Elion, had emigrated from Lithuania at twelve, came from a long line of rabbis, and graduated from New York University’s dental school in 1914; her mother, Bertha Cohen, had arrived at fourteen from a part of the Russian Empire that became Poland, and married at nineteen. Trudy, as she was known, spent her first years in a Manhattan apartment adjoining her father’s dental office, and after her brother Herbert was born the family moved to the Bronx, then still semi-suburban, with open lots and the Bronx Zoo, which she adored.
She was, in her own words, a child with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and she graduated from Walton High School at fifteen. That same year her beloved grandfather died of stomach cancer. Watching him suffer gave her a purpose. She decided to study something that might one day lead to a cure, and chose chemistry.
Hunter College and the closed doors
The 1929 crash had bankrupted her father, who had invested heavily in the stock market, and Elion believed she would never have gone to college had Hunter College not been free and her grades good enough to win a place. She entered in 1933 and graduated summa cum laude, with a Phi Beta Kappa key, in chemistry in 1937. The Depression then shut every door. She applied for graduate fellowships and assistantships at a number of universities without success, and the few laboratory jobs that existed were not open to women. She briefly enrolled in secretarial school.
She found what work she could: three months teaching biochemistry to nurses at the New York Hospital School of Nursing, then a year and a half as an unpaid laboratory assistant to a chemist who eventually paid her twenty dollars a week. With her savings and her parents’ help she entered graduate school at New York University in 1939, the only woman in her graduate chemistry class, and earned her master’s degree in 1941 while teaching chemistry and physics in New York high schools by day and doing her research at night and at weekends.
That year also brought grief. Her fiancé, Leonard Canter, a statistics student she had met after Hunter, died of bacterial endocarditis in June 1941. She never married. She later said the loss strengthened her determination to devote herself to fighting disease.
The wartime door opens
The Second World War drew men out of industrial laboratories, and women like Elion were finally hired. She worked in quality control for a food company, testing the acidity of pickles and the colour of egg yolk destined for mayonnaise, and then in a research laboratory at Johnson & Johnson that was disbanded after six months. In 1944 she took the job that would define her life: assistant to the biochemist George Hitchings at the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in Tuckahoe, New York.
Hitchings let her learn as fast as she could and take on responsibility as soon as she was ready. Trained as an organic chemist, she soon branched into microbiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, immunology and eventually virology. She also tried to earn a doctorate at night at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, but after several years of long commutes she was told she could only continue full-time. Faced with a choice between the degree and the work, she chose the work.
Designing drugs on purpose
In the 1940s most new medicines were found by trial and error: chemists made compounds and tested them to see what happened. Hitchings and Elion took a different route. They studied how normal human cells, cancer cells, bacteria and viruses differ in the way they handle nucleic acids, the building blocks of DNA and RNA, and then designed molecules that imitated natural compounds closely enough to be taken up by a cell, but differed enough to jam its machinery. Elion concentrated on the purines, one family of those building blocks.
She likened each series of studies to a mystery story, deducing what the biological results meant with very little biochemical knowledge to guide them. In the mid-1950s new discoveries about how cells make and use purines began to explain many of their findings. The approach, later called rational drug design, became the foundation of modern pharmaceutical research.
Medicines that changed the odds
The results were extraordinary. In 1950 Elion synthesised thioguanine and 6-mercaptopurine, which interfered with the multiplication of leukaemia cells; 6-mercaptopurine became one of the first effective treatments for childhood acute leukaemia, and in combination with other drugs it helped turn a disease that was almost always fatal into one that most children now survive. A close relative, azathioprine, proved able to damp down the immune system and became the first drug widely used to prevent rejection of transplanted kidneys, making organ transplantation between unrelated people practical. It is also used for severe rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
Her laboratory produced allopurinol, which blocks the formation of uric acid and is still a mainstay treatment for gout; pyrimethamine, used against malaria; and trimethoprim, used against urinary and respiratory infections. In the 1970s Elion’s group developed acyclovir, the first selective and effective antiviral drug, which attacks herpes viruses while sparing healthy cells, a proof that viruses, too, could be targeted precisely. After her retirement, researchers she had trained, using her methods, developed AZT (zidovudine), one of the first drugs used to treat HIV/AIDS. Late in life she was still working on nelarabine, a cancer drug.
Recognition at last
Elion rose steadily at Burroughs Wellcome, which later moved to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, and in 1967 she became head of the Department of Experimental Therapy, a post she held until she retired in 1983. Her colleagues called it a mini-institute, with sections for chemistry, enzymology, pharmacology, immunology and virology. She published hundreds of papers, served as president of the American Association for Cancer Research in 1983–84 and chaired a World Health Organization steering committee on malaria chemotherapy.
In 1988 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Hitchings and the British pharmacologist Sir James Black ‘for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment.’ She was the fifth woman to win the medicine prize, and one of very few Nobel laureates in science without a doctorate. More honours followed: the National Medal of Science in 1991; in the same year, induction as the first woman into the National Inventors Hall of Fame; election to the National Academy of Sciences; and foreign membership of the Royal Society. She received some twenty honorary doctorates, which she said made her feel that her decision to give up the PhD had perhaps been right after all.
The awards honoured a remarkable record. The honours she received over three decades, the American Chemical Society’s Garvan Medal in 1968, election to the Institute of Medicine and the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, traced the rising recognition of a woman whose career had begun with closed laboratory doors.
A life in the laboratory
Elion said that her work became both her vocation and her avocation. Outside the laboratory she was an avid photographer and traveller, making up for a childhood in which her family seldom went on holiday, and a passionate opera lover who held a Metropolitan Opera subscription for more than forty years. She delighted in her brother’s four children and their families. Her Jewish roots ran through her family, a father from a rabbinic line, immigrant parents who had built a life in New York, and her story was in many ways the classic one of first-generation American Jewish striving through free public education.
Colleagues remembered her as a generous mentor who insisted that junior scientists publish and receive credit for their work. From 1971 she held adjunct and later research professorships at Duke University, where each year she worked with a medical student on tumour biochemistry and pharmacology; she also served on advisory boards of the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the Leukemia Society of America.
Legacy
Gertrude Elion died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on February 21, 1999, at the age of eighty-one. The drugs that came out of her laboratory are prescribed to millions of people every year, and several appear on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. Children who survive leukaemia, people living with transplanted kidneys, and those whose herpes or shingles is controlled by acyclovir all owe something to her work.
She is equally remembered for the barriers she overcame. Turned away by laboratories because she was a woman and unable to finish a doctorate because she needed her job, she nonetheless reached the summit of her field. Asked about the Nobel Prize, she liked to say that the goal had never been the prize but getting people well. Her legacy is not only a cabinet of medicines but a method, rational drug design, that shaped how new medicines have been sought ever since.
Sources & further reading
Gertrude B. Elion, Wikipedia · Gertrude B. Elion – Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Gertrude Elion, Jewish Women’s Archive Encyclopedia (Kristine Larsen) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.