I have a cold sore. These painful, ugly little blighters
have popped up on my bottom lip since I was little and are a nuisance. However
if I catch them in time I can cut the healing time in half, with lysine
supplements and Zovirax. Zovirax has been a staple of my bathroom cabinet since
I was a teenager. So I think it is very fitting today that my chosen women of
science is the person responsible for discovering the therapeutic qualities of acyclovir, the active
ingredient in Zovirax. I mean she also helped developed drugs to treat
leukaemia, gout and the rejection of transplanted organs too, but today I’m
very grateful for her saving my poor pout every winter...
She is another who had to fight the inequalities of academia
and who triumphed over personal tragedy to make important strides in science,
this time in the field of medical research, with a legacy that includes the thousands of lives touched by
the drugs she and her associates developed over the 20th Century.
Gertrude Belle Elion 1918 - 1999
Gertrude
(Trudy) Belle Elion was born in New York City 1918, to Lithuanian immigrant
dentist Robert and Bertha (Cohen) Elion. Trudy'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. It was the death of her beloved
grandfather from stomach cancer that propelled this intellect towards the
desire to find a cure for cancer, and she chose to study chemistry as “a logical first step in committing myself to
fighting the disease.”
Despite
being awarded a first-class degree in chemistry she found it difficult to find
work as a woman chemist, and nobody was willing to fund her to do a PhD as they
worried about having the influence of a women in the lab. So instead she worked
many jobs including being a teacher and chemical plant worker and food analyst.
Tragedy
struck again in 1940 when her fiancé died of a bacterial infection. This only
fuelled her passion for medical research further. Finally in 1944 she landed a
dream job (in part due to the “manpower” shortage of such work due to the
Second World War) at the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome as a senior
research chemist. Here she worked on developing chemotherapy drugs – substances
that could interrupt metabolic processes in cancer cells without damaging
normal body cells; immunosuppressive drugs for kidney transplants
(azathioprine), treatments for gout, lupus, and severe rheumatoid arthritis,
and the all important antiviral drug acyclovir used to treat those rotten cold
sores. Her work even went on to start development of drugs to treat the AIDS
virus.
In 1988 at the age of 70 Trudy was awarded – shared with her
peer George H.
Hitchings and British chemist Sir James Black the Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine “for their discoveries of important
principles for drug treatment.” In addition to this she was awarded over
twenty honorary doctoral degrees, countless medals and awards and after her
retirement in 1983 served on the boards of the National Cancer Institute, the
American Cancer Society, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society, to name but a
few.... not bad for someone who wasn’t able to get funding for a PhD!
She
died in her sleep, at her home in North Carolina in 1999. One of her legacies
was a folder full of letters from people whose lives she had touched and whose
lives she had helped save.
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