Janet Rideout
Janet Rideout received her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She was hired by Gertrude Elion at Burroughs Wellcome. Rideout holds forty patents including the patent for AZT the drug used to fight AIDS in 1988 (Patent Number 4,724,232). The actual development of AZT as a cancer cure began in the 1960s with the work of Jerome Horowitz. In the 1980s Burroughs-Wellcom began looking for drugs to combat AIDS. Janet Rideout was assigned the task identifying thousands of possible compounds in hopes of finding the possible ones. She initially identified 14 but narrowed the search down eventually to azidothymidine or AZT. She designed a test to screen possible cures and found that AZT destroyed a virus similar to the one causing AIDS. Four other scientists including two other women, Sandra Lehrman and Martha St. Clair, share the AZT patent with Janet Rideout.
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References
Patently Female by Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek (John Wiley, 2002) pp. 93-94Web Sites
Who Invented AZT?
