Trudy Elion

Trudy Elion was born on January 23, 1918, in New York City. She was the daughter of immigrant parents and she graduated from Hunter College in New York City with a degree in biochemistry in 1937. As she was a woman, she was not allowed to get a graduate research position. Thus, she worked as a lab assistant at the New York Hospital School of Nursing (1937), an assistant organic chemist at the Denver Chemical Manufacturing Company (1938-1939), a physics and chemistry teacher at New York high schools (1940-1942), and a research chemist at Johnson & Johnson (1943-1944). She also took classes at New York University during this time, but she was unable to receive a doctorate degree as she was not able to devote herself to full-time studies. In 1944, Elion joined the Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories (today known as GlaxoSmithKline) where she worked with Hitchings for four decades. Together, they developed an array of new drugs that were effective against leukemia, autoimmune disorders, urinary tract infections, malaria, gout, and viral herpes. Their success was mainly due to the fact that they revolutionized research methods. They did not utilize a trial and error approach like previous pharmacologists and instead examined the difference between the biochemistry of normal human cells and those of cancer cells, viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. They then utilized this information to formulate drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of a particular pathogen while also leaving the human host's normal cells undamaged. This process enabled them to eliminate much guesswork and wasted effort when developing new therapeutic drugs. Although Elion officially retired in 1983, she aided in overseeing the development of azidothymidine, the first drug used in the treatment of AIDS.