Just a few hundred miles south of Yale, at the Burroughs Wellcome laboratory in New York, the biochemist George Hitchings had also227 turned to Ehrlich’s method to find molecules with a specific ability to kill cancer cells. Inspired by Yella Subbarao’s anti-folates, Hitchings focused on synthesizing decoy molecules that when taken up by cells killed them. His first targets were precursors of DNA and RNA. Hitchings’s approach was broadly disdained by academic scientists as a “fishing expedition.”
