It is a medical practitioner's dream—a drug that will affect only the metabolism of a virus or cancer, with no side effects for the patient—the so-called "magic bullet." U.S. scientists George Hitchings (1905-1998) and Gertrude Elion (1918-1999) produced not one but a whole line of these type of medicines.
Hitchings hired Elion to work in his lab in 1944, and together they conducted experiments to study the differences between how DNA is synthesized in normal human cells, cancerous cells, bacteria, and viruses. They created new compounds similar to nucleic acids—the building blocks of DNA—that would interfere with the virus (or cancer) cell's ability to reproduce, but would not affect normal healthy human cells. Their work went on to revolutionize the way drugs were developed because they came up with the idea of "rational" drug design. Instead of the usual, time-consuming, trial and error method of hoping to find a chemical that would affect a disease, Hitchings and Elion actively designed molecules that would be accepted by the cells of foreign bodies and be actively absorbed by them, delivering the drug direct to its target.
The pair worked together for forty years, perfecting one medicinal compound after another. Their work led to the development of new drugs for leukemia, gout, malaria, herpes, organ transplant rejection, rheumatoid arthritis, and the first-ever treatment for AIDS. Hitchings and Elion were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1988, together with British scientist, James Black (b. 1924), who discovered beta blockers for high blood pressure and H-2 antagonists for ulcers. Together they had definitively proved that chemistry could be used to fight infection and cancer.
