Gertrude Elion Essay

Gertrude Elion Gertrude Elion was a biochemist and pharmacologist born on January 23, 1918 in New York City.1 She extensively researched drugs “that led to the treatment of incurable illnesses such as cancer, malaria, herpes, and AIDS”, and she won and shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it in 1988.1 While her research was ground-breaking, she had some significant institutional and cultural forces that shaped her career. One of these forces was her finances and education. Although Elion was an outstanding student who skipped two grades, her father was unable to pay for her college education because he had gone into bankruptcy after the stock market crash in 1929.2 Luckily, she was able to overcome this predicament because Hunter

After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, Elion had difficulty finding a job in a chemistry lab because “all the laboratories she contacted told her they had never employed women”.1 This was because she was in a male-dominated field, so there was a lack of trust in her abilities. Resultantly, she enrolled in secretarial school for six weeks, but soon after she found a job teaching biochemistry to nurses in a New York hospital for a semester.1 She taught biochemistry until she found a non-paying job in a friend’s laboratory for professional experience.1 Her temporary change in career choice reveals how difficult it was for women to break into a male-dominated field at the time. A secretarial or teaching career were culturally considered more suitable for women, and this was why it was easier for her to be hired in those fields, regardless of her education level. Even when she did achieve her Master’s in chemistry, “she was the only woman in her class.”1 After graduating with her master’s degree, Elion may have faced the same problem as she did when she achieved her bachelor’s if it were not for World War II because it created a shortage of men in the work force. Elion was even quoted by the Washington Post with saying that “‘It was only when men weren’t available that women were invited into the lab.’”2 Thus, she was hired as “an analytical chemist in a food laboratory for the Quaker Maid Company”.1 However, Elion’s true passion was