Pharmacology Researchers Receive 1988 Nobel Prize

Abstract

DRUG RESEARCH clearly has the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. This year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine goes to three pioneering pharmacology researchers: George Hitchings, MD, and Gertrude Elion, DSc, Burroughs Wellcome Co, Research Triangle Park, NC, and Sir James Black, King's College Hospital Medical School, London. The committee noted: "While drug development had earlier mainly been built on chemical modification of natural products, they introduced a more rational approach based on the understanding of basic biochemical and physiological processes." From the prizewinners' work have come a whole string of drugs useful for treating leukemia, manipulating the immune response, controlling herpes infections, and managing gout, hypertension, heart disease, and gastric ulcers. Hitchings, a biochemist, arrived at Burroughs Wellcome in 1942 when the company was in Tuckahoe, NY. "When I started," he recalls, "it was to study antimetabolites of nucleic acid biosynthesis using analogues of the bases purine and