George H. Hitchings

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George Hitchings
George H. Hitchings in 1988
Born
George Herbert Hitchings

April 18, 1905
Hoquiam, Washington, U.S.
DiedFebruary 27, 1998 (1998-02-28) (aged 92)
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Washington
Harvard University
Known forchemotherapy
Awards
Scientific career
Institutions

George Herbert Hitchings (April 18, 1905 – February 27, 1998) was an American medical doctor who shared the 1988

Gertrude Elion "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment", Hitchings specifically for his work on chemotherapy.[2][3][4][5][6]

Education and early life

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 [1], 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,[7] he joined Alpha Chi Sigma in 1929.[8][9][10]

Career and research

Following his PhD, he worked at Harvard and

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
AIDS (zidovudine).[citation needed
]

In 1967 Hitchings became vice president in Charge of Research of Burroughs-Wellcome. He became Scientist Emeritus in 1976. He also served as adjunct professor of pharmacology and of experimental medicine from 1970 to 1985 at Duke University.[11]

Hitchings founded the Triangle Community Foundation in 1983. Hitchings is a member of the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame.

Personal life

His first wife, Beverly Reimer Hitchings, died in 1985. Hitchings remarried in 1989 to Joyce Carolyn Shaver-Hitchings, MD. Dr. Shaver-Hitchings died in 2009.[12]

Hitchings died on 27 February 1998 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.[citation needed]

Awards and honors

Hitchings was awarded the Passano award by the

Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1974.[1] In 1989, Hitchings received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[15]

References

  1. ^ a b "Fellowship of the Royal Society 1660-2015". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-10-15.
  2. S2CID 54345690
  3. PMID 3063980
  4. PMID 3060998
  5. PMID 2462143
  6. PMID 15463172
    .
  7. ^ Nobel Prize biography
  8. PMID 8195827
  9. PMID 3078084
  10. ^ Medicinal Chemistry Division, American Chemical Society, Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame, retrieved 30 August 2012
  11. ^ Weatherall, Miles (20 March 1998). "Obituary: George Hitchings". The Independent. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
  12. ^ "Nobel prize winners who contributed to Transplantation - GIN". GIN. 2018-01-27. Retrieved 2018-11-12.
  13. PMID 4895870
  14. PMID 4950964
  15. American Academy of Achievement
    .

External links
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