Fifteen grad schools rejected her. She worked as a secretary. Taught high school. Tested pickle brine in a lab to pay rent. Then she invented the drugs in your medicine cabinet. Gertrude Elion. 1937. Graduated top of her class at Hunter College in chemistry. Applied to fifteen PhD programs. Every one said no. Not because of her grades. Because she was a woman. One professor told her to her face that women didn't belong in chemistry labs. Said they were a distraction. Said she should accept her limitations. The drug companies turned her down too. Same reason. She enrolled in secretarial school. Learned typing. Worked the phones. Saved every penny. Took night classes at NYU — the only woman in the chemistry program. Took whatever lab work she could get. Spent months testing pickle brine and fruit mold because it was technically science. Then her fiance died. June 25, 1941. Leonard Canter. Heart infection. Two years before penicillin was widely available. Penicillin would have saved him. She never married after that. Never had children. Decided her life would be drugs that saved people like Leonard. She just needed someone to let her in a real lab. World War II opened the door. The men were overseas. 1944, Burroughs Wellcome hired her as an assistant to George Hitchings. Harvard chemist. Didn't care about her gender. Cared about her brain. 1950. First fake purines. Molecules that trick cancer cells into starving. The first chemotherapy drugs ever designed instead of guessed at. 1953. She tweaked one of them — replaced an oxygen atom with sulfur — and created 6-MP. Children with leukemia went into remission for the first time in medical history. Before her drug, almost every child diagnosed died within months. Today 80% of children with leukemia survive. Because of her six-year obsession. 1957. She realized the same drug suppressed the immune system.