Why Was Gertrude B Elie Important

Gertrude B. Elion: Why Is She Important? It was the day Gertrude Belle Elion would share the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology with George H. Hitchings, a medical doctor she assisted. It was their use of innovative methods for developing drugs that people recognized as an important discovery. Elion is an American biochemist and pharmacologist. Elion’s goal was to alleviate, meaning to make less severe, human suffering from illnesses. Other than the individual drugs she discovered, she also developed a new, more scientific approach to drug development. Her discovery would forever alter and accelerate medical research.

Other discoveries: Along with her discovery of a new way to develop drugs, Elion founded many other drugs that attacked the life cycle of nucleic acid. This included allopurinol, a treatment for gout, and azathioprine which was an effective immunosuppressive drug. Although reducing the body’s ability to
Elion was born on January 23, 1918, in New York City. There she lived a happy childhood with her brother, parents, and grandfather. She was raised in an Eastern European Jewish household. Elion was very close to her grandfather, who had arrived from Russia when she was three years old, and had stayed with them ever since. Unfortunately, he died painfully from stomach cancer twelve years later. This has played a big part in driving Elion’s passion to cure these terrible diseases. A few years later, after finishing high school, she got into Hunter College because of her high grades. However, after college, she didn’t have the money to graduate from school. Plus, fellowships weren’t given out to women. Around the time of World War II, Elion was nineteen, with a degree in chemistry. This is when she started looking for jobs. For a long time she worked as a secretary, a chemistry teacher, and an unpaid lab worker. In 1944, she found work assisting George Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome, a British pharmaceutical