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Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings: The Nobel Pair
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16211 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
2,910 Words |
| Author
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James Vickers
James Vickers teaches English at East Carolina University in
Greenville, North Carolina. |
In late summer 1988, Burroughs-Wellcome Company researcher emeritus Gertrude Elion jokes, "People tease me and ask where I haven't been, and it's getting harder and harder to come up with an answer."
Had she looked ahead just a few weeks she could have had a ready answer: City Hall in Stockholm, Sweden. There she would accept the 1988 Noble Prize in Medicine or Physiology along with her Burroughs-Wellcome colleagues George Herbert Hitchings and Sir James Black, currently with King's College School of Medicine and Dentistry in London and from 1977 to 1984 the director of therapeutic research at Burroughs-Wellcome's facility at Beckenham, England.
Sir James won recognition for developing receptor-blocking drugs now used to treat coronary heart disease. Elion and Hitching were the first cancer researchers to win the coveted prize, and they joined a short list of winners employed by pharmaceutical companies. The Nobel committee recognized their contribution to medical science by their having "introduced a more rational approach [to research] based on the understanding of basic biochemical and physiological processes."
During the ceremonies, Elion and Hitchings confided to King Carl XVI Gustaf that they would not be in Stockholm had it not been for a promise made by Burroughs-Wellcome founder Sir Henry Wellcome, who told his researchers, "If you have an idea, I'll give you the freedom to develop it."
Hitchings And Elion Team Up
Born in Hoquiam, Washington, on April 18, 1905, the son of a naval architect, Hitchings became attracted to research at age 12 when his 48-year-old father died following a lingering illness. He earned B.S. and M.S. degrees form the University of Washington and in 1928 began studying for a Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard. While he was a student in Boston, he met Beverly Reimer, the daughter of the Presbyterian minister with whom he boarded. In the spring of 1933 he received his Ph.D., and in June he and Beverly married.
With the Great Depression curtailing most chances for research, he stayed on at Harvard, rising to the rank of associate professor by 1939, when he took advantage of a job opportunity at Western Reserve University, a move he later came to regret because it delayed by three years his move to the research department at Burroughs-Wellcome in Tuckahole, New York. But once there, he took full advantage of
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