Finding Dora Richardson - The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen
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Hi everyone, this is Katie Couric. As you probably know, it's Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Every October when those little pink ribbons start popping up, we're reminded to make an appointment for a breast cancer screening, or we're reminded to go to an appointment we already made.

Those little pink ribbons make all of us part of the breast cancer community, and that support takes some of the fear of breast cancer away. A generation ago, there were fewer treatment options for breast cancer, and there was a lot of fear. Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation were the standard. Side effects could be brutal, and outcomes could be bleak. But in 1977, a drug called tamoxifen was approved in the U.S., and it was a game changer where survival was concerned.

By 1985, the inaugural year of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, tamoxifen was declared, quote, the treatment of choice by the National Institutes of Health because of its ability to extend women's lives after surgery. It would eventually be approved as a preventative treatment, the first of its kind.

Now, decades later, tamoxifen has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of women around the world. Today, Lost Women of Science is bringing you the first in a two-part series about the British chemist who synthesized tamoxifen. Her name was Dora Richardson. To be honest with you, I've never heard of her. In fact, very few people have. And there's a reason for that. Her remarkable story has never been told.

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. Those who knew Dora Richardson know firsthand the impact she made, and they all agreed that she hasn't received the credit she deserves.

That's about to change. This disease, which has impacted my life and most likely the life of someone you know, wasn't the same after Dora. And while Breast Cancer Awareness Month is meant to take some of the fear away, without the groundbreaking contribution of Dora Richardson, a breast cancer diagnosis would be a heck of a lot scarier. Now, here's a little pink ribbon of a story just for her.

This is Lost Women of Science. I'm your host, Katie Hafner. Today we're going back more than 80 years in search of the British chemist Dora Richardson. And as Katie Couric just mentioned, she wasn't easy to find, even by Lost Women of Science standards. In fact, when we started working on this story, we thought we didn't have enough material for one episode, let alone two. It was a real head-scratcher.

So here's the extent of what we knew when we started out. Dora Richardson was a synthetic organic chemist. For her entire professional life, she worked at ICI, which stands for Imperial Chemical Industries, an English company that had dominated the chemical industry there since the 1930s. In the early 1960s, she synthesized the drug that would become tamoxifen,

And we know this because her name is on the 1965 patent. And going into this story, that was just about all we knew. Frankly, all the scientists I spoke to, none of them ever said anything about Dora Richardson. That's Vivian Quirk, a historian of science, medicine and technology who's written extensively about drug development.

Vivian 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.

So what does it mean for someone to become that invisible, to, by all accounts, disappear? That's a question that we at Lost Women of Science ask all the time, because it's one thing for a person to be forgotten, and it's another thing for a person to fall through the cracks and disappear entirely from the historical record as a result of a kind of corporate amnesia.

As time went on and Dora's work changed the course of cancer treatment, traces of Dora herself faded away. Her once vital role as a scientist was reduced to an aside in an academic paper. But one thing remains undeniable.

You know, there is a compound at the very beginning, there is a drug at the very beginning that isn't quite yet tamoxifen, but is on its way to become tamoxifen. And Dora Richardson was very much there at the beginning.

Vivian Quirk didn't set out looking to find Dora Richardson. As part of her postdoctoral research, she had come to Alderley Park, which had been the headquarters of ICI, because she was studying the history of drugs that treated chronic disease, and tamoxifen was one such treatment.

Alderley Park is a sprawling estate near Manchester, England that dates back to the 1500s. The main hall was badly damaged by a fire in 1931, so the estate sat empty for many years. ICI bought it in 1950 to house its new pharmaceutical division. After extensive refurbishments, it opened its doors in 1957.

Back when Vivian was studying chronic disease, things were different than they are now. For starters, there was an actual archive that Vivian could visit. That research center was in a beautiful setting with fields, with sheep.

trees, and this has given me a kind of, almost like an insider view of what went on in the company where Dora Richardson carried out her work. And when I went to have lunch in the main refectory with the archivist Audrey Cooper, I had views of this beautiful setting.

By the time Vivian visited in the early 2000s, ICI had spun out its pharmaceutical business into an entity called Zeneca in 1993, and then that arm merged with the Swedish pharma company Astra to become AstraZeneca.

But for a short time after the reorganization, a range of ICI's historical documents remained in the archive. The archivist, Audrey Cooper, would prove pivotal in recovering the story of Dora Richardson. I think she worked there for 40 years or something. And so she knew the records, but she also knew some of the people who'd come to the library. And she knew the scientists. She knew what they looked like. And she...

was the one who said, well, you're interested in tamoxifen, here you are.

From somewhere deep in the archive, Audrey brought Vivian the only apparent copy of a paper titled The History of Nolvidex. Nolvidex, by the way, was Tamoxifen's first brand name. It was an internal document. A document that, as far as Vivian could tell, had never traveled beyond the archive or out of Audrey Cooper's sight.

kind of potted history, a little internal history of the early days of tamoxifen. The author was one Dora Richardson, and she wrote that paper in 1980, shortly after she retired.

It was never published, but after she had finished writing it, Dora handed it to Audrey Cooper, along with all of her handwritten notebooks from her years as a chemist, and it was filed away somewhere in the depths of Alderley Park.

It wasn't any ordinary paper. It was something which expressed emotions, feelings, hopes for the future, let some of her personality come across, I think. Vivian was not allowed to photocopy the document, but she took notes in her own shorthand. She appears first and foremost as this boffin who loves children.

her research and her lab work, which she discovered as a young woman she wanted to do. And indeed she did. That word, boffin, says it all. It's a British slang term for a nerdy scientist, an experimental tinkerer. And it's not usually applied to women. The story, or should I say the mystery, of this unpublished paper gives you a sense of just how lost Dora Richardson was.

Vivian returned the paper to the archive desk. It was referenced in Vivian Cork's writing. But only a small fraction of Dora's internal history ever made it beyond the grounds of Alderley Park. 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. And then Audrey Cooper retired. As if that weren't bad enough, Dora's major contribution to the development of tamoxifen wasn't given any significant attention by Vivian Quirk or by anyone else. In fact, it has been given almost no attention at all.

Dora documented the purely technical processes in a brief scientific paper written in 1988, but that too stayed mainly within the company's archive. And now, decades later, Dora Richardson had become a faded historical aside, a name on a patent, and not much more.

But that paper, The History of Novodex, was the one place that Dora's role was clear. And once Vivian Quirk saw it, it was clear to her that Dora was instrumental in developing the drug that would go on to save hundreds of thousands of women. That Dora was an exceptionally talented scientist and that she had been totally overlooked.

What fascinates me is the fact that she was a woman, she was a synthetic organic chemist and she worked in industry. There weren't very many female industrial chemists at that time. So the fact that she synthesized a drug that became so important for the health of women was a double attraction for me.

After Vivian returned that 70-page history of Nolvidex to Audrey Cooper, the paper was put back into its box, which was reshelved in the archive, and, just like that, Dora Richardson's personal story of how tamoxifen was developed went dark. And so, we set out to find her. Because to solve the mystery of what happened to Dora Richardson's paper, we'd have to find out more about Dora herself.

Let's go back to where her story starts, as best we can, because piecing together Dora Richardson's life is a bit like trying to weave a tapestry with a single gossamer thread. 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. There, the young Dora caught a glimpse of people working in laboratories. In an ICI company newspaper in 1979, Dora is quoted as saying, I supposed there is a certain coincidence that I got the urge to become a research chemist in a cancer hospital, then worked on Novadex.

A coincidence? Probably not really. Dora had always set her sights on working in chemistry despite the challenges. But it was far from easy. So she went to study chemistry.

at University College London. She was obviously a bright student and in a family that was quite happy for her to go and study chemistry, which wasn't a traditional destination for a bright female student in the 1930s and 40s.

For women in the UK between the two world wars, studying chemistry was especially hard. Women faced a good deal of hostility. At that time, they were excluded from societies and student unions. They were a rarity among an overwhelmingly male population. Rather than risk posing a threat to their fellow male students, young women responded by keeping a very low profile.

the opportunities that were available to female chemists in school and in work were designed to keep them from coming into competition with men. In other words, they were almost always at the bottom of the pecking order.

In the final year of Dora's studies, World War II was at its height, and the daily devastation of the Blitz brought life to a standstill. 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, Dora stuck with her studies, and she graduated in 1941.

At the time, job prospects for female chemists were limited to menial positions. And if they did land a job, they'd have to give it up if they made the mistake of getting married and having children. The only advantage in hiring women in industry at all was the price. They were paid about 80% of what the men made. Even so, it took Dora almost two years to find a job. In 1943, she got an interview with ICI.

an interview that took place at an air raid shelter in Blakely near Manchester, and then she began her lifelong career at the company. She started in a division developing synthetic anti-malarials, something that would have been extremely important to the war effort.

And from then on, it seems she was working at ICI, if not the whole time from 1943. And on the basis, it seems, of the work she'd done at ICI during the war, she got her PhD in chemistry from UCL in 1953.

Dora wrote her thesis on the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, an aspect of organic chemistry still used in industry today. And from that point forward, she was known at ICI not as Dora, but as Dr. Richardson. It would be another decade before she started work on the compound that would become tamoxifen, the very first targeted therapy to treat cancer, a treatment that would change the lives of millions.

My name is Susan Galbraith. I am the head of oncology research and development at AstraZeneca. Susan Galbraith understands that the long and winding path to launching a new product requires a team effort. The reason why I've stayed in the industry for so long and been fascinated by it is it brings together many different disciplines.

In addition to the foundational science underlying their research, scientists like Dr. Galbraith, working in industrial R&D, have to understand the clinical pharmacology. And then you've also got to understand the science and the art of drug development, of bringing that through and actually turning it into a medicine. Each step is crucial, and the need to find effective treatments for breast cancer, and to make them available worldwide, couldn't be greater.

The global numbers are staggering. Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in 86% of countries.

And it's the number one or number two cancer killer among women in 95% of countries. That's Dr. Benjamin Anderson. He's a breast surgeon who used to be the technical lead of the Global Breast Cancer Initiative for the World Health Organization. Over 600,000 deaths per year by 2040. There will be 3 million cases globally of breast cancer and 1 million deaths globally.

And so it is a big problem. - Now, Dr. Anderson works with a global NGO called City Cancer Challenge, whose focus is on helping cities improve access to quality cancer care. He looks back on how treatments have changed over his career.

You'd love to think that surgery fixes everything. But what we learned in the 1980s was that while surgery or surgery and radiation are essential for controlling the disease in the breast 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. It struck me that it was quite unusual to go back to the 1960s and have a woman being the chemist that was synthesizing this compound.

And that wasn't the only shocker. Susan Galbraith was surprised by the fact that initially, ICI was trying to enter a different market altogether. The history of many different drugs always includes an element of serendipity, and actually because they were looking for compounds for a contraceptive pill.

That's right. The initial research for tamoxifen, a paradigm-changing cancer treatment, had actually started in a division of ICI called the Fertility Regulation Program. And it was right about that time, in late 1959, that a veteran ICI scientist named Dr. Arthur Walpole recruited the only senior female chemist in the division to work on this groundbreaking project.

Dr. Dora Richardson. And we come to the part of Dora's mystery where, without further evidence, we would essentially have to say goodbye. We would quite literally have nothing more to say. But as it turns out, we got lucky. So we do have more to say. A lot more. That's after the break.

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The old ICI archive was located at Alderley Park, that sprawling 400-acre campus in the north of England. I love the idea of Vivian Quirk visiting there as a scholar, having lunch with the archivist, gazing out at the grazing sheep.

But those days are long gone. Alderley Park is now a multi-use bioscience campus for various science and technology companies. 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.

If you want to research the archive, it's available only via an internal company sponsor, which makes sense given the safeguards required to protect a pharmaceutical company's proprietary information. And then you can access only what comes up in a search of a digital index. So when we started looking for Dora Richardson's unpublished history of Nolvidex, it didn't show up.

But that didn't stop Lost Women of Science producer Marcy Thompson. So when you're talking, I'm going to be super quiet, but it's not because I'm not interested in what you're saying. Okay, so go ahead. And you can cut bits of me out that you don't want. Exactly right. Yeah, I can do that.

Marcy is on a Zoom call with Julie James, the archivist for AstraZeneca. Let's just say that Marcy hounded Julie for some time, first through an internal company sponsor and then as a producer who had a hunch that the paper was there.

So far, every search had turned up empty-handed. So what I thought I'd do is I'll pick up my computer and show you all the boxes that we brought back in. We called in, oh, absolutely tons and tons of boxes. Must have been about 40 boxes altogether. Behind Julie are stacks of research files. We've had a good look through them. I can show you what's inside them and show that you can see that you really don't want to see any more of them.

Julie begins to dig into a box in view of her computer's camera. I want me to just cut to the chase and show you what I have found that I hope is what you want. Yes, please.

So, if I just... Yeah, yeah, perfect. So this box came back, it's lots of reports, but this one's actually entitled The History of Novodex and it's authored by Dora Richardson. Wow! And I think this might be exactly what you're looking for. This is insane. Can I just stop for a second and just tell you that

This is so incredible. Okay, thank you. Okay, so this is it. Here, can you just hold it up? I just want to see the actual cover. There it is. So it's Imperial Chemical Industries PLC, Pharmaceuticals Division, and the title is The History of Novodex, authored by Richardson D. Benf.

It has a dark orange cover with black print. And this was actually written in May 1980. So she must have written this just as she was retiring, actually. And there it was, Dora's story, waiting to be discovered in that box, deep in that archive. And this history has been just encompassed in that AstraZeneca sort of ICI legacy. So it will never be made public again.

unless someone takes it to the outside world. In other words, unless we had come along, Dora Richardson's firsthand account of how she synthesized tamoxifen would have remained at the bottom of a box that was shunted from one internal corporate archive to another in the north of England as ICI's pharmaceutical arm morphed into AstraZeneca. Julie James was as excited as we were. Sometimes we get these jobs where we have to dig

write a bit more and be a bit Sherlock Holmesian. And it's been really interesting finding out more about Dora, about those times and the whole discovery piece. As it turned out, Dora's paper had been lost accidentally because of a clerical error. Now, this particular one

I will update the indexing because I think it's important that it says the history of NovoDex because I think that would have shouted out from the right from the word go.

Imagine an oversight in indexing, and poof, a person's life's work is filed in the wrong place and their contributions are lost and forgotten. The indexing for this paper didn't include the word history of Novodex, and now it's not considered proprietary or protected. In fact, we have a copy of it ourselves.

this sort of information, the history information within it and how Dora went about things and the problems that she had. They're good for everyone to know, I think. You can say that again. The paper is a treasure and it helps us tell the rest of Dora's story. As Julie says, it's good for everyone to know. And thanks to her help, our story continues.

In 1960, ICI started a new pharmaceutical division devoted to the study of fertility regulation. The era of "making love, not war" was underway, and women wanted control over their reproductive health. That same year, the American pharmaceutical company Searle had launched the first oral contraceptive approved for "married women," according to the regulations of the day. This gave rise to a headlong rush into the market.

The good news for ICI: the company had been researching hormones for some time, not as a fertility regulator, but in relation to cancer. By then, it was already widely known that some cancerous tumors responded to hormones, especially estrogen. ICI and other companies had been interested in hormone-related medicine ever since the mid-1930s, and ICI had just the man for the job.

To investigate both lines of inquiry, fertility and cancer, it was Dr. Arthur Walpole. He'd been working on the impact of estrogen on cancer since he arrived at ICI in 1937, and he'd recently been put in charge of ICI's Fertility Division. Here's Vivian Quirk. He starts working on cancer on the one hand and on hormones on the other hand.

Now, the two overlap because by then it's known that some cancers are hormone dependent, in particular breast cancer. Dr Walpole was looking for an anti-estrogen. An anti-estrogen.

is basically a drug that blocks the action of estrogen. That's Michael Dukes, a chemist turned reproductive endocrinologist who worked at ICI beginning in the mid-1960s. It's a complex field because as was known from very early days,

oestrogen controls a huge range of biological processes which come together in terms of pregnancy etc.

And anti-estrogen is simply a substance that blocks those actions. But even though it would be some time before tamoxifen's potential to treat cancer would be known, the division's early work in studying anti-estrogens hit its stride in the early 60s.

ICI was primarily focused on finding a drug that prevented implantation, what we'd now call a "morning after pill," based on the profile of an anti-estrogen called clomiphene. It was a painstaking process and very much a team effort.

They had a multitude of staff whose job it was to transfer chemicals from one place to the other and then going back to the bench and working on the chemistry, modifying the molecule.

Dora Richardson worked in Lab 8S14. There, she isolated the compound's isomers in a process called fractional crystallization. This involves six successive steps. What she does to separate these isomers so that the

best isomer for the desired effect to crystallize the compound and separate out the two isomers was considered as a considerable feat. The chemistry was difficult, and the continuous adjustment of Dora's work required communication with the team working on the biological side. The goal was to prepare a solution that could be tested on animals to find out if it stopped fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb.

And we would prepare the animals, dose the animals, and then do whatever tests were necessary to find out whether it had worked or not. That's Barbara Valkachia. Beginning in 1960, she was a lab assistant who worked on the biological side of the tamoxifen team. She worked with Dora Richardson herself. She was unusual. She was a rarity.

Because she was quiet but very good at her job, she got a better reception than anybody else. And she deserved it. She was great. Barbara recently turned 91, and she still lives close to Alderley Park.

Although she would go on to have a 44-year career at ICI and would work on the development of two important anti-cancer drugs following tamoxifen, things were difficult there for women in the early 1960s. It was just, we were almost servants, you know, we did as we were told. We weren't expected to have opinions. The life of a woman in science could be, let's just say, a bittersweet.

a bit bizarre. As a lab assistant, that was where I was given the job of chasing sheep around the field and doing all that sort of thing. Barbara's laughing because her first job at ICI involved collecting sheep feces and testing it for worms. Once she was brought into the biology side of the Tamoxifen project, Barbara describes herself as a, quote, extra pair of hands. It was better work, but the power imbalance was stark. In

In every group, there was a senior man and he had a load of assistants and his assistants were almost always female. And they got all the menial jobs, you know, emptying the body buckets at the end of the day and they had to make the tea and take it into the boss, that type of thing.

Dora, however, was something else altogether. For a woman to get to the level that Dora got to was quite unusual. There was one other senior woman in the place, and that was a vet. Barber's memory of what took place more than 60 years ago is astonishingly clear. The team was in constant contact with each other. Dora would create a compound, and she would bring it down to the biological lab where tests would be performed.

The initial hope was that the compound would prevent pregnancy, but they were also hoping the anti-estrogen would have other uses. It was a long process. Then we'd calculate the results, feed them back to Dora, and Dora and Dr. Walpole would decide on the development that should be the next line of investigation.

The line of investigation continued until finally, in 1962, the team began to see the results they were looking for. And there, in Lab 8S14, Dora Richardson synthesized a compound known as ICI 46474.

Here's Michael Dukes again. One particular batch on that critical first occasion, she did manage to get a totally pure tamoxifen, 46474, and that was the first time that

She'd got two separate isomers, and it was the first time the biologists were able to look at them separately. If she hadn't been able to separate those, we wouldn't have been able to produce the drug. We wouldn't have been able to prove that it was effective. So she was absolutely fundamental to it. In her history of tamoxifen's development, Dora simply says this.

This separation was the subject of a patent, UK 1099093. No fuss, no muss. Ever the practical boffin. I would basically say to me, as a person, she almost came over as an Agatha Christie-type character. Not only did Michael Dukes work at ICI, but his desk was right next to Dora's. She was...

I suppose of average height for a lady, that she was slim, dark hair, clearly by then a spinster and committed spinster at the time I first met her. Spinster was the common term given to a woman of a certain age who hadn't married. But I think the word demure,

would also fit her to the extent that she was modest, self-effacing. She was not ever crowing about what she'd achieved, how the work was going. But she was very, very quiet. I don't think she had a very vibrant social life.

In fact, Dora remained single her entire life. If she'd married, she wouldn't have worked because women didn't. She was good-looking, and you wonder why she chose to dedicate herself to looking after her mother and working in science. ♪

We do know that Dora had a parakeet, or as the Brits say, a budgie, and enjoyed gardening and needlework. So although her personal life remains mostly obscured, we do know what she did in her professional life to survive in a very macho environment. At the time I joined, the place was probably teeming with would-be alpha male chemists,

jostling for attention and potential promotion and all the rest of it. Dora didn't engage in any of that. She just quietly got on with her own area of work and was extremely effective in it. But at the same time, she wasn't timid or shy. On the chemistry front, she could hold her own with anybody.

She was held in high esteem. As a traditional synthetic chemist, she was just one of the best. I would describe her as being a cordon bleu synthetic chemist, that her chemical soufflés always seemed to rise, whereas mine and a lot of other people's flopped.

on regular occasion. Like gardening, some chemists have green fingers and can seem to make almost anything grow, work, reactions go. She always seemed to end up with crystals.

Here's Vivian Quirk. She is referred to as Dr. Richardson. So she, in a sense, she almost becomes a man in the way she's referred to within the archives, which shows the high standing in which she's held. So there is recognition also that the chemistry she was doing was quite extraordinary.

Arthur Walpole, the ICI veteran who led the division, was known to be fair, but demanding. Knowing how technically gifted Dora was, even among a sea of male chemists, he selected her to be part of his team. Here's Barbara Valcaccia. Dora was lucky in that she was working with someone who was willing to appreciate her and to give her credit for what she did.

It's interesting to note that Barbara had been moved to Walpole's team as a lab assistant in the fertility team for another reason. She was Protestant. The girls who were Catholics wouldn't work on the reproductive work. They wouldn't do that for religious reasons.

That's how I got shunted in to work with Dr. O'Poe. And luckily, I got to work on a lot of the reproductive physiology that involved tamoxifen, or the lead up to finding tamoxifen.

The team Dr. Walpole assembled, its cordon bleu chef at the center, now focused 100% of its energy on finding the best possible use for tamoxifen. There had to be a useful outcome at the end. And I think Doris was definitely, she was seeking to help produce useful new medicines.

As they headed into early animal trials, the results were frustrating. The team realized that what prevented pregnancy in mice and rats did not work as well in women. ICI 46474 was showing signs that it could induce ovulation. Not what you're looking for in a contraceptive.

And there were indications that it could reduce tumors. The full understanding of tamoxifen's function was not yet clear. But Dr. Rolpole and his team knew the pressure was on to find a commercially viable product. They remained convinced that tamoxifen could be proven effective in fighting estrogen-sensitive breast tumors.

And five years after the patent was registered, they started to see some early positive results. Yes, five years later. Drug development can be a very long process.

As for ICI, they were very unhappy with the initial findings. They wanted to find a contraceptive, and the clock was ticking. You know, of course, it nearly was ditched. The whole project was nearly ditched, don't you? Barbara Volcaccia heard about the project's demise at a soccer match where she ran into an executive from Alderley Park headquarters. And he said to me, yes.

Barbara was shocked. When she went to work the next day, she asked Dr. Walpole what was going on. What came next would decide the fate of millions. Tamoxifen was looking like a dead-end fertility treatment, and none of the higher-ups at ICI seemed to want to explore it as a caretaker.

a cancer therapy, but Dora Richardson and the team's inner circle had not worked this hard for this long to see it stopped now.

Next time on Lost Women of Science, the Tamoxifen project goes underground. Marcy Thompson was senior producer for this episode and Deborah Unger was senior managing producer.

Ted Woods was our sound designer and sound engineer. Our music was composed by Lizzy Yunin. We had fact-checking help from Lexi Attia, and Lily Weir created the art. Special thanks go to Dr. Susan Galbraith, who's on our advisory board and who first brought Dora Richardson to our attention. And thanks to AstraZeneca, which funded this episode.

Thank you, as always, to my co-executive producer, Amy Scharf, and to Eowyn Bertner, our program manager. Thanks also to Jeff DelVecchio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. We're distributed by PRX. For a transcript of this episode and more information about Dora Richardson, please visit our website, lostwomenofscience.org.

and sign up so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to hit that all-important omnipresent donate button. See you next week for more on Dora Richardson and the development of tamoxifen. Hi, I'm Katie Hafner, co-executive producer of Lost Women of Science. We need your help.

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