A Life-saving Team:
Gertrude Elion and Dr. George Hitchings
by Lisa Coston Hail*
very day, scientists around the world search
for new ways to fight diseases. Two scientists
who did some of the most important research
in that fight during the 1900s worked in North
Carolina. Gertrude Belle Elion and Dr. George H.
Hitchings first teamed up in 1944 at the Tuckahoe,
New York, offices of Burroughs Wellcome Company,
now known as GlaxoSmithKline. In 1970 they
moved to the pharmaceutical company's new
offices in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park,
and in 1988 they shared the famous Nobel Prize in
Medicine with Sir James Black, of England. The
research that Hitchings and Elion did helped people
battling illnesses, including leukemia. Their Nobel
Prize honored revolutionary discoveries of "impor¬
tant principles for drug treatment" and important
discoveries of actual drugs.
In a way, the two scientists' work partnership
started by chance. Elion happened to come in for an
interview on a weekend when it was Hitchings's
turn to work and to do job interviews as needed.
When she earned her degree in chemistry in 1937
from Hunter College in New York City, Elion
(1918-1999) had felt excited and ready to start work
in a laboratory.
Her excitement
faded, though,
when she could
not get hired. The
Great Depression
had made jobs
difficult to find.
And women had
an extra hard
time finding jobs
in science. Years
later, Elion
would say that
job interviewers
turned her away
after telling her
that she might be qualified — but would be "a dis¬
traction" in a lab full of men. She taught biochem¬
istry to nurses, substitute taught in secondary
schools, worked for free in a chemistry lab, and
spent time in secretarial school. About the time that
Elion finished her master's degree in chemistry at
New York University, however, World War II began
sending many men overseas to fight. New doors
opened for women back home. She got a job in a
food company's lab and spent more than a year
doing work such as testing pickle acidity, judging
the color of mayonnaise, and checking that berries
for use in jam were mold-free.
Elion had left the food lab for a temporary job
with Johnson and Johnson when she met Hitchings
(1905-1998), a respected researcher whose schedule
included every other Saturday. Not long after meet¬
ing with Elion — who had telephoned Burroughs
Wellcome earlier in the week — Hitchings gave her a
job. He had no problem hiring women or men from
different backgrounds, or sharing his knowledge
with those eager to learn.
Personal loss shaped the careers of both scientists.
Hitchings had been born in Hoquiam, Washington,
to a family that designed and built ships. When he
was twelve years old, his father — who was very
interested in science — died after being sick for a
long time. The experience of losing his father made
Hitchings want to work in medical research. After
earning bachelor's and master's degrees in chem¬
istry from the University of Washington, Hitchings
received his Ph.D. in 1933 from Harvard University.
At Harvard, he studied something that few people
knew much about at the time: the metabolism of
nucleic acids (DNA, the building blocks of the
human body). After working for a while at several
colleges, in 1942 he became the only scientist in
Burroughs Wellcome 's United States Biochemistry
Department.
Elion was born in New York City, the daughter of
immigrants from eastern Europe who wanted her to
get an education and pursue a career in something
she loved. When she was a young teenager, her
beloved grandfather died painfully from stomach
cancer. In the early 1940s her fiance, Leonard
Canter, died from a heart infection that penicillin
probably could have cured just a few years later.
Elion — who earned her bachelor's degree at a
college offering free tuition because her family had
30
ТЩН.
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•f.isrt Coston I Ml is a historical fniblications editor at the North Carolina Museum of
Ihstori/. She edits
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t loci junior Historian and other materials
