Her name was on the patent for tamoxifen, but Dora Richardson’s story was lost until now
In the early 1960s chemist Dora Richardson synthesized a chemical compound that became one of the most important drugs to treat breast cancer:In the first episode of this two-part podcast, Katie Couric introduces us to Richardson’s story, and we recount howproducer Marcy Thompson tracked down the chemist’s firsthand account of the history of the drug’s development.
Dora was an unassuming woman in a field that was, and still is, absolutely dominated by men. Because of this, there's hardly any record of her. It's almost like she didn't exist at all. The only people who truly understood her extraordinary abilities are the people who actually worked with her, and you're going to hear from some of them today.
Viviane first heard of Dora Richardson back in the early 2000s while visiting an archive at the very place where tamoxifen was developed.She spent her whole career there, and she retired from there, so she was a permanent fixture. But maybe hidden away in the synthetic chemical lab, part of a team made her doubly invisible.Doubly invisible. A female scientist in a chemistry lab.
Dora's recounting of the early development of tamoxifen, her stories of the arduous years, the obstacles, and the triumphs, all of that was returned to Audrey Cooper.She was very much the, the corporate person, but with a huge corporate memory of the institution through her job.As if that weren't bad enough, Dora's major contribution to the development of tamoxifen wasn't given any significant attention by Viviane Quirke or by anyone else.
Dora was born in 1919 in Wimbledon, South London. When she was a teenager, she visited her grandmother who was dying at London's Cancer Hospital, now known as Royal Marsden. For eight straight months, London was bombarded by German planes, forcing University College London, where she was studying, to evacuate its students to Wales. Despite this, Doris stuck with her studies and she graduated in 1941. At the time, job prospects for female chemists were limited to menial positions.
And in the lymph nodes, it's actually the drug therapy that changes overall survival. We do know that without the medicines like tamoxifen, we know that survival cannot change.When Susan Galbraith came to AstraZeneca in 2010, she was interested in AstraZeneca's portfolio of hormonal therapies to treat cancer. She was specifically interested in the story of how tamoxifen came to be.
AstraZeneca's corporate headquarters is in Cambridge, a three hour drive from there. The archive itself has been divided and moved, sent to off site locations and handled by third party vendors. Like so many aspects of modern life, what was once centralized and searchable has become dispersed.
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