Gertrude Elion on her Mother

"Oh, I wish my mother had lived to see it all. I think she had so much faith in me at a time when nobody else seemed to. And that it would have been a nice reward for her, to see that I really did finally accomplish something. But I think she would have been happy to know that, um, the kinds of work that I did, and the kinds of diseases that we worked with were something important. It was something she herself would have loved to have done, in the sense that she wanted a career. She never had the education or the opportunity to have one. But she desperately wanted me to have one.