Hitchings, George Herbert (1905-1998), was an American biochemist who helped create the first anticancer drug. In the 1940's, Hitchings and his colleague Gertrude B. Elion found that cancer cells and disease-causing bacteria and viruses process genetic information in a manner different from that of healthy cells. That discovery enabled the two researchers to develop drugs that destroy diseased cells by interfering with their reproduction, without harming normal cells. For developing such logical new approaches to drug design, Hitchings and Elion shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Scottish researcher Sir James Black.