E. Donnall Thomas and Gertrude B. Elion have several similarities in their education, families and career achievements.
Professor E. Donnall Thomas was born in Texas in 1920, and Doctor Gertrude B. Elion was born in in New York City in 1918. The two first similarities between E. Donnall Thomas and Gertrude B. Elionare are their families and their choices about their future careers. Fristly, both of them were born into good families with the thirst of knowledge since their fathers had professional careers. Specifically, Donnall’s father, Edward, was a doctor, and Elion’s father, Robert, was a dentist. Secondly, Donnall and Elion received a lot of motivation to pursue their career …show more content…
Donnall Thomas and Gertrude B. Elion tried to seek ideal jobs relevant to their majors. In 1955, Donnall got an invitation of Dr. Joseph Ferrebee and he went to the Mary Imogene Basset Hospital in New York. Immediately, they began to work on marrow transplantation in human patients and in the dog, as an outbred animal suitable for clinical care comparable to human patients. Except for an occasional patient with an identical twin, they quickly learned that allogeneic marrow transplants in man were going to be very difficult. However, he believed that bone marrow transplants could work, and he was determined to make this happen in humans. The, he put his efforts into developing methods of providing new bone marrow cells for people through transplants. Using radiation and chemotherapy, the bodies’ own bone marrow cells are killed and the immune system's rejection mechanism is subdued. Bone marrow cells from a donor are then provided through a blood transfusion. Finally, he succeeded in applying bone marrow transplants in human in 1975. About Elion, when the World War II ended, there were more working opportunities for women because the World War II removed a lot of men from workplace. Therefore, Elion easily got a job as an assistant to researcher George Hitchings at Burroughs-Wellcome, a New York drug company, in 1944. Then, she and her team focused on working about the treatments of leukemia, herpes, and AIDS. In 1950, Elion invented 6-mercaptopurine …show more content…
Elion and E. Donnall Thomas since both of them received the prize with their co-workers. In 1990, E. Donnall Thomas and his longtime co-worker in the field of kidney transplantation, Joseph E. Murray, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, whose prize is one of the world's most prestigious achievements, for their successful discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease. His goal was to establish a fully functioning of cancer-free blood and immune system. Therefore, he ventured to cure leukemia and other cancers of the blood through destroying a patient's diseased bone marrow with near-lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy and then rescuing the patient by transplanting healthy marrow. Every year, thanks to the great discovery of Donnall and his partner; around sixty-seven of thousands of leukemia patients now lead productive lives since they receive bone marrow transplant. In similar, Elion was a winner of a share of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with her co-recipients, who are George Hitchings and Sir James Black. Elion and her team won the Nobel Prize because of Azathioprine (AZT) discovery, which was the first drug approving for the treatment of AIDS. “Rarely has scientific experimentation been so intimately linked to the reduction of human suffering,” the 1988 Nobel Prize Annual