“It’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Gertrude (“Trudy”) Belle Elion’s greatest legacy is the thousands of lives touched by the drugs she and her associates developed for the treatment of leukemia (6-Mercaptopurine or 6-MP), gout (allopurinol), rejection of transplanted organs (azathioprine), and herpes (acyclovir), among other disorders.
Elion was born on January 23, 1918, in New York City, to Lithuanian immigrant dentist Robert and Bertha (Cohen) Elion. Her father came from a long line of rabbis. Elion’s intellect manifested itself at an early age: she was a voracious reader and an excellent student, graduating from Walton High School at age fifteen. The death of her beloved grandfather from stomach cancer led her to choose chemistry as “a logical first step in committing myself to fighting the disease. That was the turning point,” she later recalled. “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.”
Trudy attributed her parents’ emphasis on education to their Jewish background. “Among immigrant Jews,” she said, “their one way to success was education, and they wanted all their children to be educated, it’s a Jewish tradition. The person you admired most was the person with the most education. And particularly because I was the firstborn, and I loved school, and I was good in school, it was obvious that I should go on with my education. No one ever dreamt of not going to college.”
Elion received her B.A. summa cum laude in 1937 but found work opportunities scarce for a woman chemist. She received her M.S. from New York University in 1941. Despite her father’s losses in the 1929 stock market crash, she was able to continue her education by qualifying for tuition-free Hunter College. During this period, she also suffered the death of her fiancé. She never married. She found work as a quality control chemist at Quaker Maid Company, then as a research chemist at Johnson & Johnson. She landed a position in 1944 as a research chemist at Burroughs Wellcome, the noted pharmaceutical company, eventually becoming head of experimental therapy, a post she held until her retirement in 1983.
Gertrude Elion’s contributions over the course of her career were remarkable. Among the many drugs she helped to develop were 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, and gout. Her efforts have saved or improved the lives of countless individuals.
Elion was elated when new cures were discovered. She said, “What greater joy can you have than to know what an impact your work has had on people’s lives?” she asks. “We get letters from people all the time, from children who are living with leukemia. And you can’t beat the feeling that you get from those children.”
When Elion died on February 21, 1999, the head of Glaxo Wellcome observed,“Gertrude Elion’s love of science was surpassed only by her compassion for people.” Her generous heart and brilliant mind touched countless individuals around the world. She left a legacy that will benefit humanity for years to come.
“Don’t be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don’t let others discourage you or tell you that you can’t do it. In my day I was told women didn’t go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn’t.”
We should give thanks for people like Gertrude Elion who gave of herself to improve the life of others. As we pray for these people let us also pray for the peace of Jerusalem and the protection of Israel (Psalm 122:6). Let us remember the dedication and commitment that Elion had not only for the Jewish people, but people everywhere.
For more about Gertrude Elion and her accomplishments please read Famous Scientists, Wikipedia, and Jewish Women’s Archive.
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