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 …

- Gertrude B. Elion

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

- Gertrude B. Elion

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 t…

- Gertrude B. Elion

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 …

- Gertrude B. Elion

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 …

- Gertrude B. Elion

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…

- Gertrude B. Elion

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…

- Gertrude B. Elion

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

- Gertrude B. Elion

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…

- Gertrude B. Elion