Gertrude Elion Interview (page: 3 / 7) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

Do you feel that luck has had a role in your career?

Gertrude Elion: Luck has a role in everybody's career. You can find a dozen times when it could have gone either way. That interview could have been the other Saturday, and someone else would have interviewed me. I think about it often, how a particular person who wrote to me and asked for a compound, and made a discovery with it, which changed the whole line of what we were doing. You can't do it without luck, I'm sure, but I think you have to recognize the luck when you see it.

And be prepared to change directions?

Gertrude Elion: Yes, absolutely. We changed many times. We got into fields that I never expected to be in originally. I thought cancer was what I was going to do, and it is what I did for the first ten years. But then it changed to other things.

Even without your Ph.D., you really already had your ideal job, in terms of what you wanted to accomplish.

Gertrude Elion: Right. The amount of work that I put into it was greater than the amount I might have put into my studies in school. There was nothing to distract me. I could work ten hours a day, seven days a week with no problem. I could work in the lab as long as I wanted. I always took work home. It was my life, it wasn't just my job.

And now you have racked up quite a few doctorates of your own.

Gertrude Elion: Ten honorary ones, including one from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, which always seems poetic justice.

You describe a very intense work situation. Did you have time for any kind of social life, or other hobbies?

Gertrude Elion: I had time for social life in the early days. I am very fond of music, and a great operagoer and concertgoer. That was my main avocation. I was also very interested in photography, did quite a lot of enlarging and printing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think that my social life really took a hiatus in about 1941 -- actually before I went to Burroughs Wellcome -- because of the death of someone I loved very much. And after that, I really sort of put myself into my work in a way perhaps that I wouldn't have otherwise. I might have gotten married, and it just didn't happen, because the person I was engaged to died of a disease that could have been cured by penicillin, but there was no penicillin. That was another lesson I learned. How important some discoveries could be in life-saving. And years later, you know, thinking back on it, and saying, "If only there had been penicillin." And it was a good lesson.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

How long after that was penicillin discovered?

Gertrude Elion: About four or five years.

It's done so much to save so many lives. It sounds like your heart was broken.

Gertrude Elion: It really was. It was one of these ideal things, which you think will never happen again. And it usually doesn't. Some people are inclined to settle for something less, and I wasn't.

These days, the big question is how to balance family and career. It's a difficult juggling act, and many people are bewildered about it. How do you view that?

Gertrude Elion: In my generation, it really wasn't feasible to have both. Partly because people wouldn't hire you if you were married. If you had a child, that was the end of it, they didn't let you come back. That's all changed, and I think it is possible for women to have both, but I do think it's difficult. I think some of them underestimate the difficulty. Something has to give part of the time, and you can't expect to have everything. If people realize that, they can do it. I've had women who have children working for me in the laboratory, and many of them have done very well. Sometimes they had to take a break for a couple of years until the children were in school before they came back. I understood that. I think that was the right thing for them to do, if they felt they had to. But it is much more difficult for women. I don't underestimate the difficulty. It's probably worth it, but not everybody can do it.

I'm struck by the drive and the sense of confidence that is apparent in the whole path of your career. Did you have fears of failure?

Gertrude Elion: Not really. I had fears that a particular experiment wouldn't work, or maybe a drug I thought was going to work would not. That happened, of course, all along the way. It has to happen in a long career. What you have to gird yourself to do is to say, "OK, that one failed. It was a step which was in the wrong direction, so let's go back to the crossroads, and go in a different direction and not let the failure be the end of the line." I did learn how to do that. "OK, now I know that doesn't work. I don't have to do that again, I can head this way. Somewhere there is an answer. It may take five years, maybe ten."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think you have to have infinite patience to be a scientist. I used not to realize that, because I remember telling someone once that I didn't want to be a teacher because I didn't have the patience. And they laughed, and said, so you want to be a scientist. And I said yes. I didn't even think it was funny at the time. I now think that it was very funny.

You have to have the patience. That's what I always tried to instill in the people in my lab, that they shouldn't be too discouraged if something didn't work, that it wasn't the end of the line.

There is an element of danger in chemistry. Did you ever have a scary accident?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Gertrude Elion: I had some minor accidents. One where I was pipetting something that I probably shouldn't have been. It was a very thick solution of lye, and I got it into my mouth, and suddenly the whole lining of my mouth seemed to come off. Fortunately, I didn't swallow any of it. It hurt for a couple of days. It was very scary. I never did that again. Usually, you are supposed to use a rubber bulb pipette when you are doing anything dangerous like that. It's okay to pipette water, but that taught me a lesson. And another time I was doing a reaction in a glass tube, which was sealed, and I had it in a water bath. And I took it out, I looked at it, put it back, walked out the door, and the thing blew up into a thousand pieces. And I often thought, "What would have happened if it had happened in my hand?" I never did that again either. And other than that, I really was very fortunate.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

What caused it to blow up?

Gertrude Elion: It was an alcoholic ammonia solution. Actually, it should have been in a glass tube, but the glass tube should have been in a casing to protect it, in case it broke, because it goes under tremendous pressure. We didn't have anything like that in the lab, and it just never occurred to me that this could happen.

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