Another Woman Nobel Laureate: Gertrude Elion
Dear friends of women in science,
Back in May, the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, VA honored Gertrude Elion with a Jewish-American Hall of Fame Plaque. She won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 because she "developed the first chemotherapy for childhood leukemia, the immunosuppressant that made organ transplantation possible, the first effective anti-viral medication, and treatments for lupus, hepatitis, arthritis, gout, and other diseases." Most of the drugs she developed were derivatives of nucleotides and related compounds.
Elion was born in 1918. She died in 1999 while serving as a research professor at Duke University in North Carolina. She was unmarried.
Her Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded in 1988 along with James Black and George Hitchings. Her methods were later used to develop AZT as one of the first effective anti-AIDS therapeutic drugs.
A graduate of Hunter College in 1937 and with an MSc from New York University in 1941, she was unable to obtain an earned PhD although she did receive honorary doctorates. In her early career, she worked in the laboratory of George Hitchings at the Burroughs-Welcome Chemical Company (now GlaxoSmithKline). Hitchings never hestitated to credit Elion with a lot of his laboratory's best ideas and contributions. They focused on how the metabolism of normal cells and cancer cells differed, using the differences to design effective drugs that had limited side effects. They developed the major early chemotherapy drugs to combat cancer.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Elion was one of the few women recognized with the US National Medal of Science. In 1991, she was the first woman to be elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Did you know about her contributions? I remember a lot of discussions about developing cancer therapies right after the broadening of the scope of the National Cancer Institute was signed into law in 1971 by Richard Nixon, an event that my research supervisor at the time, Ernest Borek, attended. He thought it was a bad idea to consolidate all the cancer research at the NCI, but he still cherished the experience and the signing pen he received. Interestingly, he never mentioned either Hitchings or Elion, although I remember a lot of discussion about inhibitors of DNA synthesis as cancer chemotherapies. So I didn't know about Elion until I began to teach biochemistry and looked for examples of women who had been outstanding in the field. Then when I arrived at Pomona College, my present institution, I found that she had spoken in the Pomona College Robbins Lectureship in 1991, soon after she was award the Nobel Prize. Too bad I wasn't there yet to hear her.
cheers,
Laura
Hi Laura,
THANKS for making this post. I had never heard about her but I will most certainly never forget about her now. I'm planning to write a book about women in the sciences who have made important contributions and I think I will include her as well. It's also an excellent example that I can use especially with my female students to show that no matter what obstacles one might face in life, true achievement and recognition will come to those who are brave enough to continue to pursue their dreams.
Hi Laura,
You made me Google the NCI; I had not realized it was so old, but that years after it was formed lots of cancer research was going on in all the other institutes of NIH. Interesting how politics played a role in science funding by Republicans back then; they said it really stimulated our economy.
Nice to hear about Elion; I had heard of her but had her confused with Yallow in terms of her research. Such a nice idea, focusing on the differences in metabolism to design drugs.
Livi
Hi Melissa,
Yes, I think it must have been more possible for Jewish women to feel it was okay to pursue a career than for Christian women back in those days. It's sad to think that any women found it so hard to even get the academic training they needed. Certainly Elion couldn't go for a PhD, and there were a lot of courses that Barbara McClintock couldn't take at Cornell. I remember that as a theme in Rachel Carson's biography as well. We take access to education very much for granted today, but it wasn't so for women in the early twentieth century.
cheers,
Laura
Dear Laura,
It's interesting how many of the early women who were Nobel laureates in science were Jewish, isn't it? There were Rosalyn Yallow, Gerti Cori, Gertrude Elion. Should have been Rosalyn Franklin too, if you ask me, but of course they never award it posthumously. And Rita Levi-Montalcini. Just last year, there was Ada Yonath for ribosome structure. Without her methods for cooling the samples in the x-ray beam, probably none of the three awardees would have seen anything from their experiments.
MKS
Hi Laura,
Thanks for another good example for my students. I like your features on women in science who ought to be household words, but whom I've never heard about before. Yay!
CR
