Today in Technology History
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January 23
The late Gertrude Belle Elion, an organic chemist and molecular biologist who developed several important drugs, was born 85 years ago.
She was born to immigrant parents in New York City on January 23, 1918. Elion received an education in public schools, and then decided to study medicine in college because of the recent cancer death of her grandfather.
Elion graduated in 1937. After a few years of working as a teacher and a lab assistant, she could afford graduate school at New York University, where she was the only woman studying chemistry at the graduate level. She earned a master's degree, but never obtained a Ph.D. -- until years later, when several universities clamored to give her honorary doctorates.
Starting in 1944, Elion conducted drug research for the Burroughs-Wellcome company. (That company later became Glaxo Wellcome; it is now part of GlaxoSmithKline.) During her four decades with that company, she researched the human immune system and developed drugs that would target and attack viruses and bacteria in an infected person without harming the healthy parts of the body.
In 1988, Elion and her colleague George Hitchings were awarded the Nobel Prize for the new areas of drug research they explored. The drugs they developed are now used to fight bacterial and viral infections, to treat gout and arthritis and leukemia, and to help prevent the rejection of transplanted organs.
Gertrude Elion died in 1999, at the age of 81.
Related links:
Click here to read a brief autobiographical statement written by Elion.
Click here for a New York Times obituary of Elion.
Click here to find out why Elion was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Click here for an interview with Elion.
Click here for a summary of Elion's drug inventions.
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