7 Charles Townes 7

From 1959 to 1961 Townes served as vice president and

director of research of the Institute for Defense Analyses,

Washington, D.C. He then was appointed provost and

professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology, Cambridge. In 1967 he became a professor at the

University of California, Berkeley, where he initiated a

program of radio and infrared astronomy leading to the

discovery of complex molecules (ammonia and water) in

the interstellar medium. He became professor emeritus

in 1986.

Gertrude B. Elion

(b. Jan. 23, 1918, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Feb. 21, 1999, Chapel

Hill, N.C.)

G

ertrude Belle Elion was an American pharmacologist

who, along with George H. Hitchings and Sir James

W. Black, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or

Medicine in 1988 for their development of drugs used to

treat several major diseases.

Elion was the daughter of immigrants. She graduated

from Hunter College in New York City with a degree in

biochemistry in 1937. Unable to obtain a graduate research

position because she was a woman, she found work as a lab

assistant at the New York Hospital School of Nursing

(1937), an assistant organic chemist at the Denver Chem-

ical Manufacturing Company (1938–39), a chemistry and

physics teacher in New York City high schools (1940–42),

and a research chemist at Johnson & Johnson (1943–44).

During this time she also took classes at New York Uni-

versity (M.S., 1941). Unable to devote herself to full-time

studies, Elion never received a Ph.D.

In 1944 Elion joined the Burroughs Wellcome

Laboratories (later part of Glaxo Wellcome; today known