40 Fun Facts About Gertrude Elion

In an early 1940s job at a grocery chain's food lab, Gertrude Elion tested the acidity of which food?

Pickles were on her bench at the A&P grocery chain, where she spent a year and a half on quality control. She left once the repetitive work stopped teaching her anything.

Which qualification did Nobel laureate Gertrude Elion never finish, after her night school demanded full-time study?

A doctorate was the one thing Elion gave up, choosing her job with George Hitchings over Brooklyn Polytechnic's ultimatum. Decades later the same school gave her an honorary degree.

Whose death from stomach cancer, when Gertrude Elion was 15, made her decide to study science and fight disease?

Her grandfather had lived nearby since she was about three, taking her to the park and telling her stories. Watching him die in hospital convinced her, she said, that nobody should suffer that much.

Gertrude Elion's drug azathioprine, sold as Imuran, first made which operation work between unrelated people?

Kidney transplants between unrelated donors and patients had almost always failed until Imuran calmed the immune system. Elion handed the compound to surgeon Roy Calne after it beat an older drug in her tests on mice.

Who first told Gertrude Elion she had won the Nobel Prize, in a 6:30 a.m. phone call she took for a joke?

A reporter rang while she was getting dressed, and she told him it was a sick joke. Her phone stayed so busy that the Nobel committee could not get through, and its telegram only arrived the next day.

Gertrude Elion said she would have loved to follow which career, despite admitting she lacked the talent for it?

Opera singer was her dream job, though as a child she was asked whether she really had to sing. She settled for listening, keeping her Metropolitan subscription for more than 40 years.

Which drug did Gertrude Elion say could have cured the heart infection that killed her fiancé in 1941?

Penicillin became widely available only a few years after Leonard Canter died of bacterial endocarditis. Elion never married, and said the loss taught her how much one discovery could mean for saving lives.

Purinethol, the trade name of Gertrude Elion's 6-MP, was among the first effective drugs against which childhood cancer?

Leukemia patients on her 6-mercaptopurine at first went into remission, then relapsed. Elion spent six years studying the drug, and combinations built around it now cure most children with the disease.

In 1991, three years after her Nobel Prize, Gertrude Elion became the first woman inducted into which American body?

National Inventors Hall of Fame membership recognized the 45 patents carrying her name. At the ceremony she urged adults to protect a child's sense of wonder, which she said sometimes blossoms into invention.

Gertrude Elion recalled that 1930s interviewers refused her laboratory jobs, saying a 19-year-old woman would be what?

A distracting influence was the reason they gave after long interviews, she said, despite her summa cum laude degree. She took an unpaid assistant's post instead and worked up to $20 a week.

Acyclovir, the Gertrude Elion antiviral sold as Zovirax, was built to fight which family of viruses?

Herpes viruses, and only those viruses, have their replication blocked by acyclovir, which proved a drug could be selective. Before it, most researchers assumed any antiviral would be hopelessly toxic.

Allopurinol, which Gertrude Elion's team developed and sold as Zyloprim, treats which painful joint disease?

Gout is caused by uric acid building up in the joints, and allopurinol cuts the body's production of it. The same action protects cancer patients from the uric acid released during chemotherapy.

Daraprim, the drug Martin Shkreli's firm made notorious in 2015, was created by Gertrude Elion to fight which disease?

Malaria was the target when pyrimethamine went on sale in 1953. Six decades later Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of a tablet from $13.50 to $750, by which time it mainly treated toxoplasmosis.

Gertrude Elion said that reading as a girl about which famous scientist told her a woman could do it too?

Marie Curie's story reached her through childhood reading, and Elion spent her own later years urging women into science. In Stockholm in 1988 she was the only woman among that year's laureates.

Which tuition-free women's school in New York City did Gertrude Elion enter at 15 and leave with highest honors?

Hunter College charged no tuition, which mattered because her father had gone bankrupt. Elion later said she might never have received a higher education without it.

Gertrude Elion's father followed which profession, working from an office beside the family's Manhattan apartment?

Dentist Robert Elion later gave his daughter a life-changing tip: he had painkiller samples from Burroughs Wellcome and suggested she ask the firm for a job. He had hoped both his children would join his profession.

Gertrude Elion's father went bankrupt when she was eleven after investing heavily in what?

The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out his heavy investments, though he kept his profession and his loyal patients. His daughter's grades then won her a college place that cost nothing.

Which global event opened laboratory jobs to Gertrude Elion, as male chemists left industry for military service?

World War II changed everything, she said, because reservations about employing women in laboratories simply evaporated. Even so, her first wartime post was food quality control, not research.

As a child in 1920s New York, Gertrude Elion made frequent trips to which attraction that fed her love of science?

Bronx Zoo visits were a fixture of her childhood, since the family had moved to the borough when it still had open lots to play in. She wrote that she was very much devoted to the place.

Gertrude Elion, the Nobel-winning drug researcher, was known to friends and colleagues by which nickname?

Trudy Elion was known as an approachable boss who pushed her juniors to publish and made sure they got the credit that a lab head would normally take.

After retiring in 1983, Gertrude Elion mentored students as a research professor at which North Carolina campus?

Duke University sent her one third-year student each year to guide through tumor research. Elion published more than 25 papers with the students she mentored there.

Just before joining Burroughs Wellcome, Gertrude Elion spent six months at which New Jersey company's short-lived lab?

Johnson & Johnson disbanded the laboratory after about six months, which left her choosing between several research offers. The one that intrigued her most was a post as assistant to George Hitchings.

Gertrude Elion was the only woman in her graduate chemistry class at which institution, earning a master's in 1941?

New York University let her do the research at night and on weekends while she worked days. She wrote that no one seemed to mind a lone woman in the class, and she did not find it strange herself.

After graduate schools rejected all her funding applications, Gertrude Elion spent six weeks training for which career?

Secretary was the fallback she trained for after fifteen applications for graduate funding were turned down. She left the secretarial school as soon as she found a job.

While doing her master's research on nights and weekends, Gertrude Elion earned a living doing which day job?

Substitute teacher in the city's secondary schools was her job for two years, covering chemistry, physics and general science. She left the classroom when wartime laboratory posts opened up.

Gertrude Elion, who traveled widely on her vacations, described herself as an avid follower of which hobby?

Photography was more than snapshots for her: she did a good deal of her own enlarging and printing. She traced her love of travel to a childhood in which the family seldom went away on vacation.

Gertrude Elion wrote that on the cold January night she was born, what happened in her family's apartment?

The water pipes burst after freezing, but her mother was safely in hospital rather than at home. That detail opens the autobiography Elion wrote for the Nobel Foundation in 1988.

Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings are remembered as pioneers of which approach to finding new medicines?

Rational drug design exploits the biochemical differences between healthy cells and pathogens, so a compound can stop one without harming the other. Her lab joked that it had the cures and now needed the diseases.

Which Scottish developer of beta blockers shared the 1988 Nobel Prize with Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings?

James Black also invented the ulcer drug cimetidine. Each of the three laureates received a third of the prize, which rewarded principles of drug treatment and not any single product.

Burroughs Wellcome, Gertrude Elion's employer for 39 years, was later absorbed into which British-based drug giant?

GlaxoSmithKline grew out of two mergers: Wellcome joined Glaxo in 1995, and Glaxo Wellcome combined with SmithKline Beecham in 2000. Elion stayed on as a consultant until her death, long after retiring.

Which honor for researchers did President George H. W. Bush present to Gertrude Elion in 1991?

The National Medal of Science reached Elion at 73, more than half a century after laboratories had refused to hire her at all.

Gertrude Elion's father emigrated to the United States at the age of 12 from which European country?

Lithuania was his birthplace, and he came from a long line of rabbis. Her mother arrived at 14 from a part of Russia that later became Poland, and married at 19.

In 1968 Gertrude Elion won which chemistry award, created in 1936 to honor women in the field?

The Garvan Medal of the American Chemical Society was the first award established to honor women chemists. Elion received it two decades before her Nobel Prize, a year after taking charge of her own department.

Gertrude Elion is among the scientists profiled in which 1999 documentary, released in the year she died?

Me & Isaac Newton, directed by Michael Apted, interviews seven researchers about what drew them to their work, among them Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker.

Gertrude Elion's antiviral acyclovir treats shingles and which itchy childhood illness caused by the same virus?

Chickenpox and shingles are both caused by the varicella zoster virus, whose DNA production acyclovir slows. Approved for use in 1981, the drug was hailed as the start of a new era in antiviral therapy.

Gertrude Elion created the cancer drug 6-MP by replacing an oxygen atom on a purine molecule with which element?

Sulfur turned an ordinary purine into a decoy: enzymes latch onto the altered molecule in place of the natural one, which blocks the cell from making DNA.

Burroughs Wellcome hired Gertrude Elion in 1944 at its laboratory in which village in Westchester County, New York?

Tuckahoe was near enough to her home that her father suggested she simply ask for work there. She was interviewed on a Saturday morning, when George Hitchings happened to be the one on duty.

Which cancer drug, approved by the FDA in 2005, was Gertrude Elion still helping to develop when she died in 1999?

Nelarabine, sold as Arranon, targets certain T-cell cancers that have resisted other chemotherapy. It reached patients six years after Elion's death, one more product of her decades of purine research.

In her 1940s job at a food laboratory, Gertrude Elion checked the color of egg yolks going into which product?

Mayonnaise was one of the products she checked, measuring the color of the yolks that went into it. She said the job taught her a good deal about instrumentation before its repetition made her restless.

Gertrude Elion's first job after college was a three-month post teaching biochemistry to which group of students?

Nurses at the New York Hospital School of Nursing were her pupils, but the trimester system meant the same post would not come round again for nine months.