Gertrude Elion and Dr. George Hitchings By Lisa Coston Hall
Reprinted with permission from The Tar Heel Junior Historian,
Fall 2006. Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of
History Every day, scientists around the world search for new
ways to fight diseases. Two scientists who did some of the most
important research in that fight during the 1900s worked in
North Carolina. Gertrude Belle Elion and Dr. George H. Hitchings
first teamed up in 1944 at the Tuckahoe, New York, offices of
Burroughs Wellcome Company, now known as GlaxoSmithKline. In
1970 they moved to the pharmaceutical company’s new offices in
North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, and in 1988 they shared
the famous Nobel Prize in Medicine with Sir James Black, of
England. The research that Hitchings and Elion did helped people
battling illnesses, including leukemia. Their Nobel Prize
honored revolutionary discoveries of “important principles for
drug treatment” and important discoveries of actual drugs. In a
way, the two scientists’ wo