Gertrude Elion

Sexist exclusion in the life sciences may be a more recent phenomenon than many of us realize.

Today is the birthday of pharmacologist Gertrude Elion, born in New York City in 1918. She was a bright girl who loved every subject in school and agonized when she had to choose just one path in college. The death of her beloved grandfather of cancer tipped the scales in favor of science; she wanted to use her intellect to fight the disease. She majored in chemistry at Hunter College and then hit a brick wall when she tried to enter the job market in her field. “Nobody … took me seriously. They wondered why in the world I wanted to be a chemist when no women were doing that. The world was not waiting for me.” She went to secretarial school so she could pay the bills, and finally, she got a job as an unpaid lab assistant. With World War II came more opportunities for female scientists and in 1944 she went to work for the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome. It was there that she formed a research partnership with Dr. George Hitchings that would last more than 40 years. Over the course of her career, Elion developed drugs to treat leukemia, malaria, herpes, and AIDS. She won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1988. WA