Gertrude Belle Elion
A Lifeline

(Throughout this page, click on highlighted footnote numbers for links to sites with more information.) In many profound ways, the story of the history of science is the story of people's lives. The development of chemotherapeutic agents owes much to Gertude Belle Elion. Elion's parents were immigrants to America, and she did not have the access to the traditional educational career leading to the doctoral degree that most highly successful scientists follow. Despite this, Elion had an extraordinary career in the chemical sciences and their applications to human health.

Menu Early 1900s   1918 1929 1933 1937 1937–44 1944 1944–49 1950 1950s 1960s 1983 1988 1999

Moreover, she began her scientific career in the 1940s, the World War II era. This was a time when women at the cutting-edge of scientific research were quite rare, and this makes Elion's successes all the more remarkable. Her career spanned the decades from the 1940s through the 1980s, and throughout this time Elion witnessed significant strides women took to be included in the scientific enterprise. Her research accomplishments include six different drugs used to combat nine serious medical conditions including leukemia, organ transplants, viral herpes and AIDS. (1)

Early 1900s	Elion's parents emigrated to United States, her father from Lithuania and her mother from the region of Russia that eventually became Poland. Her father worked his way through dental school at New York University. Her mother was a seamstress. (2)
January 23, 1918	Elion was born in New York City. In 1921, her grandfather emigrated from Russia and moved in with Gertrude and her family. He was a watchmaker and a learned scholar. He and the young Gertrude spent hours together through her youth. Theirs was a close and loving relationship. Elion's brother, Herbert, was born in 1924. (2)
1929	Elion's father was bankrupted by the stock market crash, seriously affecting the studious Elion's prospects of attending college. (3)
1933	Elion was able to enroll at Hunter College, then the women's division of City College of New York, at age 15 since it was tuition-free. Had it not been free, Elion likely would not have attended college at all. Her beloved grandfather was dying of stomach cancer, and his death in 1933 determined Elion's choice of a college major—chemistry. "I was a child with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and remember enjoying all of my courses almost equally. When it came time at the end of my high school career to choose a major in which to specialize I was in a quandry. One of the deciding factors may have been that my grandfather, whom I loved dearly, died of cancer..." Gertrude Belle Elion (4) "That was the turning point. It was as though the signal was there, 'This is the disease you're going to have to work against.' I never really stopped to think about anything else. It was that sudden." Gertrude Belle Elion (4)
1937	Elion earned her chemistry degree from Hunter College at age 19. Although she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, she received no financial aid from any of the 15 graduate schools to which she had applied. She could not find a job either—the Great Depression still persisted—but Elion later reflected on what she suspected was the real reason for her rejections. "I hadn't been aware that there were doors closed to me until I started knocking on them. I went to an all-girls school. There were 75 chemistry majors in that class, but most were going to teach it . . . When I got out and they didn't want women in the laboratory, it was a shock . . . It was the Depression and nobody was getting jobs. But I had taken that to mean nobody was getting jobs . . . [when I heard] 'You're qualified. But we've never had a woman in the laboratory before, and we think you'd be a distracting influence.'" Gertrude Belle Elion (5)
1937-44	Elion worked at a number of jobs that were not related to chemistry, and several that were. She worked as a doctor's receptionist, taught high school chemistry and physics in New York City as a substitute teacher, taught biochemistry to nursing students at New York University, worked for the Denver Chemical Company, for A&P stores, for Quaker Chemicals, and at Johnson & Johnson (among her routine duties were checking the color of mayonnaise, the acidity of pickles, and mold on fruit). Her jobs in the chemical industry opened up largely because men were not available during World War II. All the while she saved money to pay for her education. At nights and on weekends, she worked toward a master's degree in chemistry, earning it in 1941. She was the only female in the graduate class at NYU. (6) In this time period her fiancée died of bacterial infection. Elion never married. "I never intended not to get married. It wasn't a distinct decision. About the time I graduated from college, I had fallen in love with a young man . . . when he graduated he went to work for Merrill Lynch, and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis . . . Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery . . . " Gertrude Belle Elion (7) "This was also a time when women couldn't have both a family and career very easily. I don't think that's true now. I see women who have both. In those days it would have been very much frowned on for a married woman to be working, or to come back to the lab if she had a child. Nowadays, nobody thinks twice about taking maternity leave and coming back." Gertrude Belle Elion, 1988 (7)
1944	Elion joined Burroughs Wellcome as senior research chemist working with George Hitchings at $50 per week. She was one of only two women among a laboratory staff of 75. Finally, this was a job that would allow her to do actual research, and Elion valued her opportunities to learn on the job. "...Dr. Hitchings permitted me to learn as rapidly as I could and to take on more and more responsibility when I was ready for it. From being solely an organic chemist, I soon became very much involved in microbiology and in the biological activities of the compounds I was synthesizing. [I was able] to broaden my horizons into biochemistry, pharmacology, immunology and eventually virology." Gertrude Belle Elion, 1988 (4) Also, Elion began studying for a doctorate at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. However, she could not finish her degree and continue to work at same time. She never earned her Ph.D., although later she was awarded three honorary doctor's degrees. "For a number of years I felt that I hadn't done my job because I hadn't gone ahead and gotten a doctorate . . . It wasn't until a couple years after I achieved real professional success that I could say, 'Oh, who cares?' But I did care . . . For years I really felt the lack of that degree; now I consider it a badge of honor. Now when I meet young women who want to go into science and they say, 'But of course I could never do it without a Ph.D.,' I say, 'But of course you can.'" Gertrude Belle Elion, 1988 (7)
1944-49	Elion and her research group studied how cells make nucleotides well before the structure of DNA (8) was determined by James Watson and Francis Crick (8) a decade later. In the 1940s it had just been discovered that DNA carried genetic information. Hitchings' and Elion's "pathways" approach to developing drugs relied on finding out how cells used chemistry to produce DNA, and therefore how the cells grow. Their drugs would be the "magic bullets" that Paul Ehrlich, decades earlier, had predicted scientists would one day be able to create. (9) DNA's double-helical structure.
1950	Elion and Hitchings tested diaminopurine (a derivative of purine) on leukemia patients at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York. They found that the patients improved only to relapse later. This pattern indicated that diaminopurine had toxic effects. purine diaminopurine
1950s	Disappointed at the failure of diaminopurine, Elion developed 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), another derivative of purine. Children given this new drug went into remission. Well known columnist Walter Winchell (10), founder of a cancer research foundation, reported the apparent success of 6-MP in his newspaper column and within days the Food and Drug Administration approved it for use. Again, children with leukemia first improved and then relapsed, and often died. However, by synthesizing 6-MP Elion showed that small changes in a compound needed by cells could chemically "fool" the malignant cells and thereby combat them. 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP) azathioprine Elion's group developed azathioprine, a compound related to 6-MP. Azathioprine was not effective against cancer cells but it did act to suppress the body's immune system. This suppression became quite important for advances in surgery. In particular, the transplantation of an organ from one animal into another had proven difficult because the “recipient's” immune system reacted to the transplanted organ as if it were a harmful foreign invader. This was the phenomenon of “rejection,” which led to serious and even fatal complications. With azathioprine came the possibility that the immune system could be “suppressed,” and the process of organ rejection could be avoided. Dr. Roy Calne had performed kidney transplants on dogs and found that 6-MP and its analogues, supplied to him by Hitchings and Elion, prevented rejection of the new organ. The first successful kidney transplant took place between identical twins in Boston in 1954. Dr. Robert Murray performed the first kidney transplant between unrelated individuals using azathioprine (Imuran) in 1961. (11)
1960s	Allopurinal (12), another relative of 6-MP, was developed in Elion's lab and was found to be helpful in the treatment of gout (a build-up of uric acid in the joints) as well as during chemotherapy. It is also effective against several major diseases that are common in South America. uric acid allopurinol
1983	Elion retired from research at Glaxo-Wellcome.
1988	Elion is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. (13)
1999	Gertrude Belle Elion passed away, February 1999.

Bonus Page

For an in-depth look at the life of Gertrude Elion, read the biographical sketch of Elion and George Hitchings, reproduced from the book Pharmaceutical Achievers by Mary Ellen Bowden. Click here to read it.

For more information, at other Web sites...

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988 — Information on the life and work of Gertrude B. Elion, including an autobiography from the Nobel Foundation.


Purine and Pyrimidine Metabolism — from NetBiochem, a program of Allegheny University of the Health Sciences and at the University of Utah.

Gertrude B. Elion — part of the Biographical Memoirs series from the National Academy of Sciences.

Gertrude Elion — an excellent in-depth online biographical exhibit, part of Women of Valor, from the Jewish Women's Archive.