02/11/2026
In 1937, a 19-year-old woman graduated summa cm laude in chemistry. She applied to 15 graduate schools. Not 1 offered her funding. She was told labs would not hire women. She never earned a PhD. She went on to win the Nobel Prize and save millions of lives.
Her name was Gertrude Belle Elion, and the world almost never heard of her.
Gertrude was born on January 23, 1918, in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Her father, Robert, had emigrated from Lithuania at the age of twelve and worked his way through dental school. Her mother, Bertha, had come from what is now Poland at fourteen. The family lived in a small apartment connected to her father's dental office in Manhattan. When Gertrude was six, her brother Herbert was born, and the family moved to the Bronx.
She was an extraordinary student. She skipped two grades and graduated from Walton High School at just fifteen years old. She loved learning with a hunger she later described as insatiable. She excelled in every subject and was curious about everything.
Then, in the summer of 1933, her world changed.
Her grandfather — the man she had been closest to since he immigrated from Russia when she was three — was dying of stomach cancer. She watched him suffer for months. She watched doctors try everything and fail. She watched cancer take someone she loved, and she could not do anything to stop it.
"I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer," she later recalled. "I decided that nobody should suffer that much."
That fall, at fifteen, Gertrude entered Hunter College, the free women's college of the City University of New York. Her family had lost their savings in the stock market crash of 1929, and free tuition was the only reason she could attend. She chose to major in chemistry with one clear purpose — to find a cure for cancer.
She graduated summa cm laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1937, at the age of nineteen. She was brilliant, driven, and ready to begin.
The world was not ready for her.
It was the depths of the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce for everyone — and the few laboratory positions that existed were not open to women. Gertrude applied to fifteen graduate programs hoping for a fellowship or assistantship. Not one university offered her financial support.
She spent six months at secretarial school. She found a three-month position teaching biochemistry at the New York Hospital School of Nursing. When that ended, she was unemployed again. Rather than sit idle, she accepted an unpaid position as a laboratory assistant just to gain experience. After a year and a half, she was earning twenty dollars a week.
But Gertrude never stopped learning.
In 1939, she entered the graduate chemistry program at New York University, attending classes at night while teaching high school science during the day to support herself. She was the only woman in her classes. In 1941, she earned her Master of Science degree in chemistry from NYU.
She later said she believed the only reason she was able to further her education was because, during World War II, there was a shortage of male chemists. Doors that had been bolted shut for women suddenly cracked open because the men were gone.
In 1944, she took a position at Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceutical company as a laboratory assistant to biochemist George Hitchings. It was the opportunity that changed everything.
Hitchings saw immediately what everyone else had missed. Gertrude was not just capable. She was extraordinary.
Together, they began working on something that would revolutionize medicine: rational drug design.
In the 1940s, most drug development was essentially trial and error — scientists threw chemicals at diseases and hoped something worked. Hitchings and Elion took a radically different approach. They studied how diseases operated at the molecular level, understood the biochemistry of how cells reproduced, and then designed drugs that specifically targeted the differences between diseased cells and healthy ones. They were precision engineers in an era of guessing.
During these years, Gertrude also pursued doctoral studies at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, attending classes at night and commuting long distances after full days in the lab. But in 1946, the university told her she could no longer continue part-time — she would have to quit her job and attend full-time to earn her PhD.
It was the most difficult decision of her life. She chose to stay with Hitchings and the research she loved. She never completed her doctorate.
And then came the discoveries.
In 1950 and 1951, Elion synthesized a series of compounds including 6-mercaptopurine, known as 6-MP. It was the first drug to demonstrate the ability to fight childhood leukemia. Before 6-MP, a diagnosis of childhood leukemia was a death sentence. Children died, usually within months.
6-MP on its own produced temporary remissions. But when combined with other drugs, it began producing lasting results. Children with leukemia started going into full remission. They started surviving. They started growing up.
That drug alone would have been enough for a lifetime of achievement. Gertrude was just getting started.
She went on to develop azathioprine — the first immunosuppressant drug that made organ transplantation practical. Before azathioprine, organ transplants almost always failed because the patient's immune system attacked the transplanted organ. Azathioprine suppressed the immune response just enough to allow transplants to succeed. Suddenly, kidney transplants worked. Heart transplants became possible. People who would have died got decades more to live.
In the 1970s, Elion and her team developed acyclovir — one of the first truly effective antiviral drugs. Before acyclovir, viral infections were nearly impossible to treat specifically. Doctors could only manage symptoms and hope the patient recovered. Acyclovir proved that viruses could be targeted with precision. It was effective against herpes simplex, Epstein-Barr virus, chicken pox, and shingles. It revolutionized how medicine thought about treating viral infections.
And Gertrude's research on how drugs interact with DNA and RNA laid crucial groundwork for AZT — the first effective treatment for HIV and AIDS. After her official retirement, she played a significant role in AZT's development, contributing directly to saving lives during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Through all these decades of groundbreaking work, there was a personal sorrow that few people knew about. Before she joined Burroughs Wellcome, Gertrude had fallen in love with a young man named Leonard Canter. They became engaged. Then Leonard contracted subacute bacterial endocarditis — an infection of the heart. There was no treatment available. He died.
Gertrude never married. She later said that no one she met afterward could live up to Leonard. She poured herself into her work. Her brother's children and grandchildren became her family. Her great-nieces and great-nephews adored her. One of them called her "my goddess."
In 1967, Elion was named head of the Department of Experimental Therapy at Burroughs Wellcome, a position she held until her retirement in 1983. Even after retiring, she continued working at the lab nearly full-time as Scientist Emeritus and Consultant. She also became a Research Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at Duke University, where she mentored third-year medical students and published more than twenty-five papers with the students she guided.
In 1988, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three scientists for their "discoveries of important principles for drug treatment."
One of them was Gertrude B. Elion.
She was seventy years old. She had been doing groundbreaking work for more than four decades. She was one of only a handful of Nobel laureates in the sciences who had never earned a PhD. Brooklyn Polytechnic, the very school that had told her to quit her job to finish her doctorate, later awarded her an honorary PhD.
In 1991, she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. That same year, President George H.W. Bush presented her with the National Medal of Science. She received honorary doctorates from George Washington University, Brown University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and many others — degrees given in recognition of achievements that surpassed most people who held them.
Throughout her later years, Gertrude mentored young scientists, especially women. She spoke openly about the discrimination she had faced and advocated for change. She served on advisory boards for the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia Society of America, and the World Health Organization.
She held more than forty-five patents over the course of her career.
On February 21, 1999, Gertrude Belle Elion died at the age of eighty-one.
By then, the drugs she had developed had saved millions of lives. Children with leukemia grew up, went to college, had families of their own — because of 6-MP. Transplant recipients lived decades longer than would have been possible — because of azathioprine. People with viral infections recovered instead of suffering lifelong complications — because of acyclovir. HIV and AIDS patients survived — because of treatments built on her research.
Her legacy is not just the specific drugs she created. It is the entire approach to how medicines are developed. Before Elion and Hitchings, drug discovery was mostly luck. After them, it became precision science. Every targeted cancer therapy, every antiviral medication, every drug designed to hit a specific molecular target owes something to the path she pioneered.
She once said, with characteristic modesty: "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit."
Gertrude Elion should be as famous as Jonas Salk or Alexander Fleming. She is not, and that is wrong.
So let us remember her now. The girl who promised her dying grandfather she would fight cancer. The woman who was turned away by fifteen universities. The scientist who chose her lab over a PhD and never looked back. The researcher who changed medicine forever — without the credentials the world said were necessary, but with every ounce of the brilliance they could never deny.
~Old Photo Club
