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After graduating from college, Elion met and
fell in love with Leonard Canter, a handsome young
statistics major at City College. After he
graduated, Canter received a fellowship to study
abroad, and through the letters they exchanged, he
and Elion fell even more in love. After he
returned, they planned to get married.
In 1941, the young couple's dreams were
shattered when Canter fell ill with acute bacterial
endocarditis, an infection of the heart. A few
years later, his illness would have been easily
cured by penicillin, but at the time, little could
be done. Six months later, Canter died.
Canter's death, like her grandfather's, spurred
Elion's scientific drive. "It reinforced in my
mind the importance of scientific discovery, that
it really was a matter of life and death to find
treatments for diseases that hadn't been cured
before," she said. A decade and a half later,
that message was again intensified in a very
personal manner when Elion's mother died of
cervical cancer in 1956.
Following her fiancé's death, Elion threw
herself even more into her work. None of her
subsequent suitors could ever live up to Leonard,
and she never married. Her brother's children and
grandchildren took the place of the children she
never had; indeed, she called her niece and nephews
"our children," occasionally even "my
children." Her great-nieces and -nephews adored
her, and one even referred to her as "my
goddess."
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