What Did Gertrude B Elion Do?
Question by : what did Gertrude B Elion do?
I am doing an essay for civics and My essay is on Gertrude .B Elion but I have no idea what she did!!! PLEASE HELP!=)
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Answer by RetroRay
IN BRIEF, Gertrude B. Elion (January 23, 1918 – February 21, 1999), known to her friends as Trudy, was a research scientist who left a remarkable legacy of important drug discoveries.
She was born in New York City. Her father emigrated from Lithuania when he was twelve years old and went on to become a dentist in the United States. Her mother was a homemaker who arrived in the United States from Poland at the age of fourteen.
By the time she was twelve, she had been promoted two years ahead of her class. After receiving her B.S. Degree in chemistry from Hunter College in 1937, she realized that neither she nor her family had enough money for her to attend graduate school. She began to look for a job, and immediately had difficulty in finding a position as a chemist. She taught high school and she was permitted to work with a chemist, as a volunteer. During this period she earned her M.S. Degree in 1941 from New York University.
Her first significant opportunity came when the United States entered World War II. She was hired as an analytical chemist; but her job included such tasks as the measurement of the acidity of pickles and the color of mayonnaise. She soon tired of this; and in 1944, she went to work at Burroughs Wellcome, Inc., where she worked with biochemist George Hitchings. She spent the next 39 years at Burroughs Wellcome, becoming head of the Department of Experimental Therapy in 1967.
By 1951, she and Hitchings succeeded in developing a number of drugs that interfered with purine utilization called purine antimetabolites. Two of these were tested at the Sloan-Kettering Institute and were found to be active against leukemia in rodents. One of these, 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP), was then tested on children with acute leukemia at ten American medical centers. At that time there were no effective drugs for these terminally ill children and not one in three lived as long as one year. The drug 6-MP was found to produce complete, though temporary, remission. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1953. The success of this and related purine antimetabolite drugs opened up a whole new area of research in leukemia chemotherapy.
In the process of studying how 6-MP worked in both animals and humans, she developed a related compound called azathioprine. It was tested first as an anticancer drug, but was later found to have another important function: It blocked the immune response leading to the rejection of foreign transplants. In 1960, this drug was tried out successfully in a kidney transplant on a collie. By 1962, successful human kidney transplants from unrelated donors became a reality, using azathioprine as an immunosuppressant drug. Azathioprine is still used in kidney transplants. It is also used to treat other serious diseases such as severe rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus.
In 1968, she and Hitchings developed a drug found to be highly active against herpes virus. In 1970, they synthesized a new antiviral agent, acyclovir. This drug proved effective against several types of herpes virus and is not toxic to normal cells. It has been used in treating herpes since 1981, and also in treating patients with the painful disease known as shingles, caused by the varicella-zoster virus. Acyclovir was approved by the Food and Drug Administration 1984.
In 1983, she retired, and assumed the status of scientist emeritus. She remained active in research and professional organizations and held adjunct professorships at Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and Ohio State University. As a consultant she was also able to maintain her association with her former employer, now Glaxo Wellcome, Inc., in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. She attracted many associates who became known as a “research dream team,” some of whom invented azidothymidine (AZT), a mainstay drug for treatment of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection.
In 1988, she shared the Nobel Prize in medicine with her long-time associate George H. Hitchings and English scientist James Black. In awarding the prize to Elion and Hitchings, the Nobel committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute said their work is so important that each of the seven drugs for which they are being honored “could have won a Nobel.”
Among her awards, in addition to the 1988 Nobel Prize, were the National Medal of Science, presented by President George Bush in 1991; the Garvan Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1968; the President’s Medal from Hunter College in 1970; the Judd Award from Memorial-Sloan Kettering Institute in 1983; the Cain Award from the American Association for Cancer Research in 1984; the Ernst W. Bertner Memorial Award from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and the Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society in 1990; and 23 honorary degrees.
She was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1990 (and served on the Council) and to the Institute of Medicine in 1991. She was a fellow of the American Academy of Pharmaceutical Scientists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
For more information, much in her own words, please see:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-autobio.html
http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/medicine/1988b.html
http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/gelion.html
http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/pharm/chemo/readings/lifeline.htm
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/eli0int-1
http://www.nndb.com/people/099/000132700/
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