Gertrude B. Elion Quotes

• Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Motivational, Fear, Women

  101 Copy quote

• Nobody . . . took me seriously. They wondered why in the world I wanted to be a chemist when no women were doing that. The world was not waiting for me.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Waiting, World, Wanted

  45 Copy quote

• The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I've developed are rewards in themselves.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Medicine, Drug, Rewards

  53 Copy quote

• It is important to go into work you would like to do. Then it doesn't seem like work. You sometimes feel it's almost too good to be true that someone will pay you for enjoying yourself. I've been very fortunate that my work led to useful drugs for a variety of serious illnesses. The thrill of seeing people get well who might otherwise have died of diseases like leukemia, kidney failure, and herpes virus encephalitis cannot be described in words.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Get Well, Hard Work, Serious Illness

  29 Copy quote

• I had fallen in love with a young man... and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Science, Men, Discovery

  "Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants". Book by Susan A. Ambrose, Barbara B. Lazarus and Indira Nair, 1997.

  38 Copy quote

• People ask me often [whether] the Nobel Prize [was] the thing you were aiming for all your life, and I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for a Nobel Prize because, if you didn't get it, your whole life would be wasted. What we were aiming at was getting people well, and the satisfaction of that is much greater than any prize you can get.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Crazy, People, Would Be

  55 Copy quote

• I had no specific bent towards science until my grandfather, who died - that summer - of stomach cancer. ... I decided that nobody should suffer that much.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Cancer, Science, Suffering

  "The Legacy of Great Science". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. March 6, 1991.

  32 Copy quote

• Maybe I was young and 'cute' (after all, I was only twenty then), but I've learned over the years that when you put white lab coats on chemists, they all look alike!

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Cute, Science, Years

  16 Copy quote

• I think it's a very valuable thing for a doctor to learn how to do research, to learn how to approach research, something there isn't time to teach them in medical school. They don't really learn how to approach a problem, and yet diagnosis is a problem; and I think that year spent in research is extremely valuable to them.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  School, Science, Thinking

  21 Copy quote

• That was the turning point. It was as though the signal was there, 'This is the disease you're going to have to work against.' I never really stopped to think about anything else. It was that sudden.

  Gertrude B. Elion

  Thinking, Disease, Signals

  22 Copy quote

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