Nobel Prize Recipient in Physiology and Medicine. She received notoriety after being awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She shared the Nobel Prize with her research colleague, George H. Hitchings, and Scottish scientist, James Black. Black developed the drug Cimetidine that suppresses the formation of gastric acid and is used to fight ulcers. She and Hitchings were instrumental in the development of medications for various cancers and bacterial infections, as well as AIDS, herpes, gout, malaria and transplantation. Born Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion, the oldest of two children of immigrants, her father was from Lithuania and her mother from Russia. Her father became a dentist in New York City, but became bankrupt in the Great Depression. She graduated with a degree in science from Hunter College, a free college, in 1937. After graduation, she had a short-term position of teaching biochemistry to nurses in the New York Hospital School of Nursing and a low-pay lab assistant position. Saving her money, she was able to attend graduate school, studying chemistry, and receiving her master's degree from New York University in the fall of 1939. She attended Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute part-time, working toward her PhD, but from lack of funding, never earned the degree. On June 25, 1941 her fiancée died from bacteria endocarditis; she never married. This followed with other laboratory positions, which did not have any research. Eventually, she accepted a research position in 1944 assisting Dr. George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, a private funded research group. She became very involved with cancer research, working with numerous groups, including the National Cancer Institute, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the Leukemia Society of America. She was member of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Transplantation Society, the American Society of Biological Chemists, the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Hematology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. After Burrough Wellcome Foundation relocated to North Carolina, she became an Adjunct Professor then Research Professor Duke University for nearly 30 years. She retired in 1983 from Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, remaining as Scientist Emeritus and Consultant. Although she never earned her PhD, she received an honorary doctorate from George Washington University, the first of 25 honorary degrees. She was the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991, was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1995, and received in 1991 the National Medal of Science in Chemistry from United States President George H. W. Bush.