By 1944, Hitchings’s fishing expedition had yet to yield a single chemical fish. Mounds of bacterial plates had grown around him like a molding, decrepit garden with still no sign of a promised drug. Almost on instinct, he hired a young assistant named Gertrude Elion, whose future seemed even more precarious than Hitchings’s. The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master’s degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and performing her
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