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Soon after graduating from high school, Elion
found a focus for her widespread intellectual
curiosity. Watching her beloved grandfather die
painfully of stomach cancer and deciding "nobody
should suffer that much," she dedicated herself
to finding a cure for cancer. "That was the
turning point," she later recalled. "It was
as though the signal was there: 'This is the
disease you're going to have to work against.' I
never really stopped to think about anything
else."
That fall, Elion entered Hunter College. Unlike
many people of their era, the Elions never thought
twice about sending their daughter to college.
Trudy attributed her parents' emphasis on education
to their Jewish background. "Among immigrant
Jews," she said, "their one way to success
was education, and they wanted all their children
to be educated.... [I]t's a Jewish
tradition. The person you admired most was the
person with the most education. And particularly
because I was the firstborn, and I loved school,
and I was good in school, it was obvious that I
should go on with my education. No one ever dreamt
of not going to college. That never came up."
Luckily for the Elions, who had suffered
financially from the stock market crash of 1929,
Hunter was free to those with good enough grades to
get in.
In preparation for working on cancer, Elion
majored in chemistry rather than biology because,
as she said later, she wished to avoid dissecting
animals. The all-female Hunter provided a
supportive environment for studying science, and
Elion commented later that it did not occur to her
that there was anything unusual about her choice of
a subject. "There were seventy-five chemistry
majors in that class," she remembered.
"[W]omen in chemistry and physics?
There's nothing strange about that."
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