George H. Hitchings

In 1933, he married Beverly Reimer, an artistic and intelligent young woman. The couple had two children. His wife died in 1985 after more than 50 years of marriage. His second marriage was to Joyce Shaver.

He suffered from Alzheimer's disease during his later years and died on February 27, 1998.

George Herbert Hitchings was born on April 18, 1905, in Hoquiam, Washington, to George Herbert Hitchings, Sr., a marine architect and shipbuilder, and his wife Lillian Matthews.

Both his parents loved to read, a trait that he too inherited. He enjoyed a happy childhood until his father became ill and died after a prolonged illness when George was just 12. This tragic childhood experience kindled in George an interest in medical research.

He performed well as a student and graduated from Seattle's Franklin High School as salutatorian in 1923 and went to the University of Washington as a premedical student. He graduated with a degree in chemistry cum laude in 1927 and spent the summer working at the Puget Sound Biological Station at Friday Harbor, Washington.

He earned his master’s degree in 1928 with a thesis based on the work he did at the Puget Sound Biological Station.

He was then offered fellowships for further graduate work at the Mayo Foundation and at Harvard; he chose the latter. He spent one year as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge following which he was accepted as a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School. He earned his Ph.D. in 1933.

His career began in the middle of the Great Depression. The initial years of his career were difficult as he was unable to get a stable well-paying position. He held temporary appointments at the C.P. Huntington Laboratories of Harvard in cancer research, at the Harvard School of Public Health in nutrition research, and at Western Reserve University.

The year 1942 marked the actual beginning of his productive career. He joined the Wellcome Research Laboratories in Tuckahoe, New York, as head of the Biochemistry Department. This position offered him considerable freedom to develop his own program of research.

Gertrude Elion—his future collaborator—joined in 1944. Hitchings, along with Elion and other members of his staff, began researching on drugs, developing compounds for specific diseases and testing them on animals. Their research led to new insights on a variety of diseases affecting immunity.

In the mid-1940s Hitchings’ team began an important project on antiviral work in collaboration with Randall L. Thompson at Western Reserve. The scientists focused on vaccinia virus which shed light on the process of effective curative chemotherapy of viral infections.

The major drugs his team worked on included 2, 6-diaminopurine (a compound to treat leukemia) and p-chlorophenoxy-2, 4-diaminopyrimidine (a folic acid antagonist).

George H. Hitchings was a pioneer in the field of chemotherapy. Working with his team, he focused on vaccinia virus and produced some active compounds that paved the way to the development of effective curative chemotherapy which would hinder the fast multiplication of cancer cells in the body.