Hitchings, George Herbert, 1905-98, American pharmacologist, b. Hoquiam, Wash., Ph.D. Harvard, 1933. Hitchings spent most of his career at Burroughs Wellcome Laboratories (1942-75), where he and fellow researcher Gertrude B. Elion developed drug treatments for leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, viral herpes, urinary and respiratory tract infections, and AIDS. In 1988 the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with British pharmacologist Sir James Black.

(born April 18, 1905, Hoquiam, Wash., U.S.—died Feb. 27, 1998, Chapel Hill, N.C.) U.S. pharmacologist. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Over nearly 40 years, he and Gertrude Elion designed a variety of new drugs that work by interfering with replication or other vital functions of specific disease-causing agents; these drugs include those to treat leukemia, severe rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases (also useful for suppressing rejection after organ transplants), gout, malaria, urinary and respiratory-tract infections, and herpes simplex. In 1988 he shared a Nobel Prize with Elion and James Black.

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(born April 18, 1905, Hoquiam, Wash., U.S.—died Feb. 27, 1998, Chapel Hill, N.C.) U.S. pharmacologist. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Over nearly 40 years, he and Gertrude Elion designed a variety of new drugs that work by interfering with replication or other vital functions of specific disease-causing agents; these drugs include those to treat leukemia, severe rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases (also useful for suppressing rejection after organ transplants), gout, malaria, urinary and respiratory-tract infections, and herpes simplex. In 1988 he shared a Nobel Prize with Elion and James Black.

Learn more about Hitchings, George Herbert with a free trial on Britannica.com.

George Herbert Hitchings (April 18, 1905 – February 27, 1998) was an American doctor who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir James Black and Gertrude Elion "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment," Hitchings specifically for his work on chemotherapy.

Hitchings was born in Hoquiam, Washington, in 1905, and grew up there, in Berkeley, California, San Diego, Bellingham, Washington, and Seattle. He graduated from Seattle's Franklin High School, where he was salutatorian, in 1923, and from there went to the University of Washington, from which he graduated with a degree in chemistry cum laude in 1927, after having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior the year before. That summer, he worked at the university's Puget Sound Biological Station at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island , and received a master's degree the next year for his thesis based on that work.

From the University of Washington, Hitchings went to Harvard University as a teaching fellow, ending up at Harvard Medical School. Before getting his Ph.D. in 1933, he joined Alpha Chi Sigma in 1929. During the next ten years, he would work at Harvard and Western Reserve University. In 1942, he went to work for Wellcome Research Laboratories, where he began working with Gertrude Elion in 1944. Drugs Hitchings' team worked on included 2,6-diaminopurine (a compound to treat leukemia) and p-chlorophenoxy-2,4-diaminopyrimidine (a folic acid antagonist). According to his Nobel Prize autobiography,

The line of inquiry we had begun in the 1940s [also] yielded new drug therapies for malaria (pyrimethamine), leukemia (6-mercaptopurine and thioguanine), gout (allopurinol), organ transplantation (azathioprine) and bacterial infections (co-trimoxazole (trimethoprimA)). The new knowledge contributed by our studies pointed the way for investigations that led to major antiviral drugs for herpes infections (acyclovir) and AIDS (zidovudine).

In 1967 Hitchings became Vice President in Charge of Research of Burroughs-Wellcome. He became Scientist Emeritus in 1976. He died in 1998 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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