Best Of: Finding Dora Richardson – The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode One

Best Of: Finding Dora Richardson – The Forgotten Developer of Tamoxifen, a Lifesaving Breast Cancer Therapy - Episode One

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Katie Couric: 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.

Katie Couric: 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 agree 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.

Katie Hafner: This is “Lost Woman 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 Woman 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.

Viviane Quirke: Frankly, all the scientists I spoke to, none of them ever said anything about Dora Richardson.

Katie Hafner: That's Viviane Quirke, a historian of science, medicine, and technology, who's written extensively about drug development.

Viviane first heard of Dora Richardson back in the early 2000s while visiting an archive at the very place where tamoxifen was developed. 

Viviane Quirke: 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.

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Katie Hafner: 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. 

Viviane Quirke: 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.

Katie Hafner: Viviane Quirke 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 Viviane was studying chronic disease, things were different than they are now.  For starters, there was an actual archive that Viviane could visit.

Viviane Quirke: That research center was in a beautiful setting with fields, with sheep, trees. And this has given me a kind of, um, almost like an insider view of what went on in the company where Dora Richardson worked. 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.

Katie Hafner: By the time Viviane 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.

Viviane Quirke: 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 would 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, you're interested in tamoxifen. Here you are. 

Katie Hafner: From somewhere deep in the archive, Audrey brought Viviane the only apparent copy of a paper titled The History of Nolvadex. Nolvadex, by the way, was tamoxifen's first brand name. 

Viviane Quirke: It was an internal document. 

Katie Hafner: A document that, as far as Viviane could tell, had never traveled beyond the archive. Or out of Audrey Cooper's sight.

Viviane Quirke: A kind of potted history, a little internal history of the early days of tamoxifen. 

Katie Hafner: 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.

Viviane Quirke: It was something which expressed emotions, feelings, hopes for the future, let some of her personality come across, I think.

Katie Hafner: Viviane was not allowed to photocopy the document, but she took notes in her own shorthand.

Viviane Quirke: She appears, first and foremost, as this boffin who loves her research and her lab work, which she discovered as a young woman, she wanted to do, and indeed she did.

Katie Hafner: 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. Viviane returned the paper to the archive desk. It was referenced in Viviane Quirk'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.

Viviane Quirke: She was very much the, the corporate person, but with a huge corporate memory of the institution through her job. 

Katie Hafner: 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 Viviane Quirke 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 Nolvadex, was the one place that Dora's role was clear, and once Viviane Quirke 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.

Viviane Quirke: 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.

Katie Hafner: After Viviane returned that 70-page history of Nolvadex 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 Nolvadex. A coincidence? Probably not really.

Dora had always set her sights on working in chemistry despite the challenges. But it was far from easy. 

Viviane Quirke: 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. Uh, in the 1930s and 40s.

Katie Hafner: For women in the U.K. 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, Doris 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 percent 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 antimalarials, something that would have been extremely important to the war effort. 

Viviane Quirke: 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 Ph.D. in chemistry from UCL in 1953.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Susan Galbraith: My name is Susan Galbraith. I am the Head of Oncology Research and Development at AstraZeneca.

Katie Hafner: Susan Galbraith understands that the long and winding path to launching a new product requires a team effort.

Susan Galbraith: The reason why I've stayed in the industry for so long and been fascinated by it is it brings together many different disciplines.

Katie Hafner: In addition to the foundational science underlying their research, scientists like Dr. Galbraith, working in industrial R&D, have to understand the clinical pharmacology.

Susan Galbraith: And then you've also got to understand, um, the science and the art of drug development, of bringing that through and actually turning it into a medicine.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Ben Anderson: Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in 86 percent of countries and, uh, it's the number one or number two cancer killer among women in 95 percent of countries.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Ben Anderson: Over 600,000 deaths per year by 2040, there will be three million cases globally of breast cancer and one million deaths per year. And so it is a big problem.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Ben Anderson: 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.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Susan Galbraith: It struck me that it was quite unusual to go back to the 1960s and have a woman being the chemist, um, that was synthesizing this compound. 

Katie Hafner: 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.

Susan Galbraith: The history of many different drugs always includes an element of serendipity. And actually because they were looking for compounds for a contraceptive pill.

Katie Hafner: 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. 

Katie Hafner: The old ICI Archive was located at Alderley Park, that sprawling 400 acre campus in the north of England. I love the idea of Viviane Quirke 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 Nolvadex, it didn't show up. 

But that didn't stop “Lost Women of Science” producer, Marcy Thompson.

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. 

Julie James: And you can cut bits of me out that you don't want. Right.

Marcy Thompson:  Exactly right. Yeah, I can do that.

Katie Hafner: 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. 

Julie James: 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, we called in, Oh, absolutely tons, tons of boxes, um, must've been about 40 boxes all together.

Katie Hafner: Behind Julie are stacks of research files.

Julie James: We've had a good look through them. I can show you what's inside them and show that you can, you can see the, you really don't want to see any more of them.

Katie Hafner: Julie begins to dig into a box in view of her computer's camera.

Julie James: Want me to just cut to the chase and show you what I have found that I hope is what you want? 

Marcy Thompson: Yes, please. 

Julie James: So, so if I just. 

Marcy Thompson: Yeah, yeah. Perfect. 

Julie James: So this box, um, came back, it's lots of reports, but this one's actually entitled “The History of Nolvadex,” and it's authored by Dora Richardson.

Marcy Thompson: Wow!

Julie James: And I think this might be exactly what you're looking for.

Marcy Thompson: 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. 

Julie James: Um, so it's Imperial Chemical Industries, PLC pharmaceuticals division, and the title is The History of Nolvadex, authored by Richardson, D. N.

Katie Hafner: It has a dark orange cover with black print.

Julie James: And this was actually written in May 1980. So she must have written this just as she was retiring, actually.

Katie Hafner: And there it was, Dora's story, waiting to be discovered in that box, deep in that archive. 

Julie James: And this history has been just encompassed in that AstraZeneca sort of ICI legacy, so it will never be made public unless someone takes it to the outside world.

Katie Hafner: In other words, unless we had come along, Dora Richardson's first hand 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.

Julie James: Sometimes we get these jobs where we have to dig quite a bit more and be a bit Sherlock Holmesian. Um, and it's been really interesting finding out more about Dora, about those times and, uh, the whole discovery piece.

Katie Hafner: As it turned out, Dora's paper had been lost accidentally because of a clerical error.

Julie James: Now this particular one, I will update the indexing because I think it's important that it says the history of Nolvadex because I think that would have shouted out from the, right from the word go.

Katie Hafner: 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 Nolvadex, and now it's not considered proprietary or protected. In fact, we have a copy of it ourselves.

Julie James: 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.

Katie Hafner: 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, quote, “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 Viviane Quirke.

Viviane Quirke: 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.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Walpole was looking for an anti-estrogen. 

Michael Dukes: An antiestrogen, is basically a drug that blocks the action of estrogen.

Katie Hafner: That's Michael Dukes, a chemist turned reproductive endocrinologist who worked at ICI beginning in the mid 1960s.

Michael Dukes: It's a complex field, because as was known from very early days, estrogen 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.

Katie Hafner: 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 antiestrogen called clomiphene.

It was a painstaking process and very much a team effort. 

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

Katie Hafner: Dora Richardson worked in Lab 8S14. There, she isolated the compound's isomers in a process called fractional crystallization.

Viviane Quirke: 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.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Barbara Valcaccia: And we would prepare, prepare the animals, dose the animals, and then do whatever tests were necessary to find out whether it worked or not. 

Katie Hafner: That's Barbara Valcaccia. Beginning in 1960, she was a lab assistant who worked on the biological side of the tamoxifen team. She worked with Dora Richardson herself. 

Barbara Valcaccia: She was unusual. She was, she was a rarity. Because she was quiet, but very good at her job, she, she got a, got a better, better reception than, than anybody else. And she, she deserved it. She was great.

Katie Hafner: 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. 

Barbara Valcaccia: It was just, we were almost servants, you know. We did as we were told. We weren't expected to have opinions.

Katie Hafner: The life of a woman in science could be, let's just say, a bit bizarre.

Barbara Valcaccia: As a lab assistant, that was where I was given the job of chasing sheep down fields and doing all that sort of thing.

Katie Hafner: 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. 

Barbara Valcaccia: 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. Um, you know, emptying the body buckets at the end of the day, and then you have to make the tea and take it in to the boss. It was that type of thing. 

Katie Hafner: Dora, however, was something else altogether.

Barbara Valcaccia: 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.

Katie Hafner: Barbara'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.

Barbara Valcaccia: Then we'd calculate the results, feed them back to Dora, and Dora and Dr. Walpole would decide on a on the development that should be the next line of investigation.

Katie Hafner: 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 46,474. Here's Michael Dukes again.

Michael Dukes: One particular batch on that critical first occasion, she did manage to get a totally pure tamoxifen, 46,474, and that was the first time she'd got two separate isomers. And it was the first time the biologists were able to look at them separately.

Barbara Valcaccia: 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. 

Katie Hafner: In her history of tamoxifen's development, Dora simply says this: This separation was the subject of a patent U.K. 1099093. No fuss, no muss. Ever the practical boffin.

Michael Dukes: I would basically say to me, as a person, she almost came over as an Agatha Christie-type character.

Katie Hafner: Not only did Michael Dukes work at ICI, but his desk was right next to Dora's.

Michael Dukes: She was, I suppose, of average height for a lady, but she was slim, uh, dark hair. Clearly, by then, a spinster and committed spinster at the time I first met her.

Katie Hafner: Spinster was the common term given to a woman of a certain age who hadn't married.

Michael Dukes: 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, you know, what she'd achieved, what the work, how the work was going.

Barbara Valcaccia: But she was very, very quiet. I don't think she had a very vibrant social life.

Katie Hafner: In fact, Dora remained single her entire life.

Barbara Valcaccia: If she'd married, she wouldn't have worked because women didn't. She was good looking and I, and you wonder why she chose to dedicate herself to looking after her mother and working in science.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Michael Dukes: At the time I joined, the place was probably teaming with would-be alpha male chemists jostling for attention and potential promotion and all the rest of it. Um, 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, you know, around with anybody.

Katie Hafner: She was held in high esteem.

Michael Dukes: 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 souffles 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.

Katie Hafner: Here’s Viviane Quirke.

Viviane Quirke: 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.

Katie Hafner: 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.

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.

Katie Hafner: 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.

Barbara Valcaccia: The girls who were Catholics wouldn't work on the reproductive work. They wouldn't do that for religious reason. That's how I got shunted in to work with Dr. Walpole, and luckily, I got, I got to work on and do a lot of the reproductive physiology that involved tamoxifen, or the lead up to finding tamoxifen.

Katie Hafner: The team Dr. Walpole assembled, its cordon bleu chef at the center, now focused 100 percent of its energy on finding the best possible use for tamoxifen.

Michael Dukes: There had to be a useful outcome at the end. And I think Dora's was definitely, she was seeking to help produce useful new medicines.

Katie Hafner: As they headed into early animal trials, the results were frustrating. The team realized that what prevented pregnancy in mice and rats didn't work as well in women. ICI 46,474 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. Walpole 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.

Barbara Valcaccia: You know, of course, it nearly was ditched. The whole, the whole project was nearly ditched. Don’t you?

Katie Hafner: Barbara Valcaccia heard about the project's demise at a soccer match where she ran into an executive from Alderley Park headquarters.

Barbara Valcaccia: And he said to me, You know the project's dropped, don't you? And I said, No, nobody's told me. They said, Yes. It's, uh, it's dropped. It's completely, it's no good. 

Katie Hafner: Barbara was shocked. When she went to work the next day, she asked Dr. Walpole what was going on. 

Barbara Valcaccia: And he said, nothing. 

Katie Hafner: 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 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.

Barbara Valcaccia: At that time, I had a room with animals in, and it was in the sub basement of a dark, creepy place. 

Katie Hafner: 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 Lizzie Younan. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiyah and Lily Whear 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 Burtner, our program manager. Thanks also to Jeff DelVisio 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.

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Finding Dora Richardson - Episode Two Transcript

Katie Couric: Hi, I'm Katie Couric. In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, “Lost Women of Science” is bringing you part two of the amazing story of Dora Richardson, the British chemist behind the groundbreaking breast cancer treatment tamoxifen. The compound that she synthesized in 1962 would not only go on to save lives, it would change the way we look at how cancer could be treated. Not as a death sentence, but as a chronic condition that could be managed through medical therapy. Today you'll hear about how that out-of-the-box thinking made a global impact, and the never before heard story of the life saving drug that almost didn't happen.

Katie Hafner: This is “Lost Women of Science,” and I'm Katie Hafner.

This is the second episode about Dora Richardson, the organic chemist who was so lost to history we almost despaired of finding enough information to tell any story at all. But here we are, in Episode Two. It's 1970, and Dora is working in the Fertility Regulation Division at chemical giant, ICI, in the north of England.

She and division head, Arthur Walpole, are investigating two possible uses for tamoxifen. As a possible oral contraceptive or as an anti-tumor agent. On the one hand, there was disappointment. Tamoxifen was not turning out to be the contraceptive ICI had hoped for. But it was beginning to show some promising results in reducing estrogen receptor positive tumors.

It was an entirely new approach. And the best word for it is groundbreaking.

Viviane Quirke: At that time, When Dora Richardson synthesized tamoxifen, there were no drugs specifically targeting the organs of the reproductive system. There wouldn't have been any.

Katie Hafner: That's Viviane Quirke, the historian we met in last week's episode.

The longstanding goal of Drs. Walpole and Richardson was to take this groundbreaking compound and test its efficacy on the people who needed it most. Those with advanced breast cancer, and that is just what they did. 

At a clinical trial in 1970, tamoxifen, which went by the brand name Nolvadex, was given to 60 late stage breast cancer patients.

Katie Hafner: After 10 weeks, tamoxifen had shrunk tumors substantially in 40 of those women, with very few side effects. This was truly a breakthrough moment. No chemo, no surgery. Just anti-estrogen drug therapy. The research team was elated. 

In that once lost and now found paper that we unearthed in the last episode, Dora described that early trial in 1970, and she wrote this, “Patients with breast cancer treated with Nolvadex felt capable of doing a day's work.”

For women who had been subjected to debilitating, sometimes ineffective cancer treatments, this was very big news.

Viviane Quirke: Dora Richardson describes, with some emotion, the reports they were getting, the team were getting, of clinical trials with tamoxifen in breast cancer patients. And describing how women who were able to leave hospital without being crippled by pain from their cancer was obviously very encouraging to the team.

Katie Hafner: And not only that, these results confirmed the early hunch of Drs. Walpole and Richardson: That an anti-estrogen, like tamoxifen, could mark the beginning of a whole new treatment approach. 

Michael Dukes: Just to make it abundantly clear, manifestly, you know, ICI, the inventors including her had been correct back in 1963 in predicting these compounds would be useful in treating cancer.

Katie Hafner: That's Michael Dukes, a chemist who started working at ICI in 1967, just two years after tamoxifen received its patent.

Michael Dukes: My area of research did not impinge upon Dora, but I had the great fortune to be allocated a desk next to Dora.

Katie Hafner: But even with the encouraging results from that first trial in 1970, tamoxifen's development was moving at a molasses-like pace.

Michael Dukes: It was partly because of the way tamoxifen emerged and developed. By the standards of that time, it was very slow to get to clinical trial.

Katie Hafner: So where, logically, might you think ICI would go from here? Do you think they'd double down on the positive results from the breast cancer trials? Would they expand the research staff in order to understand the drug's potential more quickly?

Well, the best description of the higher ups at ICI was narrow minded. The company wanted to find an anti-estrogen to compete on the contraceptive market, and tamoxifen was not that. As the top executives at ICI saw it, the market for cancer drugs was not necessarily a lucrative one, especially in a patient population that suffered from advanced cancer.

As Michael Dukes describes it, Arthur Walpole felt intense pressure from ICI to produce results, and quickly.

Michael Dukes: He knew the facts. He knew the issues. He knew the problems. They weren't things you could deal with quickly. It inevitably took quite a long time.

Katie Hafner: So what would Arthur Walpole's bosses decide to do?

Much of Dora Richardson's once lost paper is a compendium of detailed notes on the process of isolating the isomers in the pure version of tamoxifen. That's all very interesting, especially if you happen to be a chemist, but there's a section I find even more interesting. Dora describes a meeting that she attended at ICI in which the successful results of that breast cancer trial were presented.

She wrote, “This encouraging result was not universally received with enthusiasm within ICI, as it was said the team were supposed to be looking for an oral contraceptive, not an anti cancer agent!” Exclamation mark. There are a few exclamation marks in Dora's history of Nolvadex, four to be precise, and a bit of punctuation wouldn't normally draw attention to itself, but in Dora's case, an exclamation point does, especially coming from a very quiet person. 

Katie Hafner: And this one speaks volumes. It marks a sort of unfiltered version of Dora, a way that she was noting, even if it was to herself, the exasperation she felt, especially given what came next. 

She wrote, “Shortly after this meeting, it was proposed that Nolvadex be dropped from development since it was never going to cover the research and development costs and bring an appropriate return to the division.” 

Ouch. 

Here's Michael Dukes again.

Michael Dukes: So drug sales for the treatment of breast cancer. Were very small at that time. The commercial people felt we're only going to take part of that market. So is it worth it? And that was why they were very, very lukewarm.

Katie Hafner: The mood of the research team, Dora wrote, turned from elation to despondency. But ICI hadn't planned for what came next.

Barbara Valcaccia: We actually did officially drop the project and we worked, you could say, semi-secretly to continue it.

Katie Hafner: That's Barbara Valcaccia, who was Dora Richardson's colleague and Arthur Walpole's lab assistant. As Barbara describes it, her frustrated boss went rogue. He conscripted Barbara and Dora to continue with the tamoxifen research in stealth mode.

Barbara Valcaccia: Nobody, well Dora knew about it. But nobody else knew what we were doing. And this was something squeezed into lunch breaks and coffee breaks and goodness knows what else.

Katie Hafner: The entire tamoxifen project went underground. Literally.

Barbara Valcaccia: At that time, I had a room with animals in, and it was in the sub-basement of a dark little place. I did the experiments for several months, for Dr. Walpole, and just the two of us knew about it

Katie Hafner: For her part. Dora continued making the compound needed for the underground experiments, which couldn't have been easy.

Barbara Valcaccia: Dora had managed to, was still working with us though by that time. She must have been shifted onto another project, but she still found time to do bits for us.

Katie Hafner: Arthur Walpole was affectionately known in the division as Wallop, and he had the reputation of being a brilliant scientist who could work effortlessly in both chemistry and biology. Colleagues described him as an absent-minded professor type.

Barbara Valcaccia: He was very intense in that he wanted his work done properly and evaluated properly…he wasn't a nitpicker. He just wanted to know that the work was reliable.

Katie Hafner: He wasn't a nitpicker, but he was tough. After several months of toiling in secret, Dr. Walpole gave ICI an ultimatum. The company could give tamoxifen research its formal blessing, or he could resign. 

Barbara Valcaccia: He threatened to resign and the project was reinstated.

Katie Hafner: Tamoxifen research was back on. In her understated way, Dora recounted what one person running the clinical trial said at the time. ICI could not morally withdraw the drug in light of the encouraging results. ICI's motives for continuing are unclear to this day. Whether ICI leadership reinstated research because they recognized the moral imperative or because they were afraid of losing the brilliant Arthur Walpole, no one really knows.

And that April, in 1972, the company did find a reason to resume research.

Michael Dukes: Fortunately, Walpole was able to see it through.

Katie Hafner: But let's stop here for a moment to reflect. Of course, with any drug development, there are any number of reasons why a particular drug might not make it to market. But in the case of tamoxifen, which began as a treatment for women with late stage cancer and was later approved as a preventative treatment for breast cancer in high risk patients, the absence of this treatment would have been devastating to so many women who have since benefited from tamoxifen. 

Indeed, it's hard to fathom what might have happened without tamoxifen. Boy do we women have a lot to thank Dora Richardson, Arthur Walpole, and Barbara Valcaccia for. Not just their determination, but their grasp of the moral imperative to keep going. It was a long uphill climb.

Barbara Valcaccia:  It is really, um, something that is so effective and has helped so many people to have had to struggle to such an extent to get it onto the market.

Katie Hafner: Once the research started up again, officially that is, the team conducted more clinical trials. Some of which took place at the very hospital where Dora had visited her dying grandmother. The place where Dora was inspired to become a chemist in a cancer research lab. The researchers continued to see positive results. Tamoxifen's genius at fighting estrogen receptive breast cancer was becoming clearer. 

When you read Dora's unpublished paper, you get the feeling that she knew the early story of tamoxifen's development needed to be written down, if only to make sure it was told correctly one day, just in case anyone went looking for it.

Julie James: I think a lot of science is hidden until it gets to a certain point. 

Katie Hafner: That's Julie James, the archivist who combed through those 40 boxes looking for the history of Nolvadex for us. In Julie's work at the archive, she notices that researchers might look back to the moment a drug is launched, but they don't go back much further than that.

Viviane Quirke: The people that were before that point just get forgotten.

Katie Hafner: Tamoxifen's story is no different. By looking back beyond the launch of the drug on the market, we can see why the worldwide success of this drug was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was a revolutionary approach.

Ben Anderson: Well, you know, we talk about cancer in general, and we tend to think of, well, there's cure, and then there's not cure.

Katie Hafner: That's Dr. Benjamin Anderson, the former breast surgeon we met in the last episode. In his role working with the Global Breast Cancer Initiative at “The World Health Organization,” he's seen the impact tamoxifen has made on the health of women around the world. That's due, Dr. Anderson explains, to the elegance of tamoxifen's mechanism of action.

Ben Anderson: Well, tamoxifen comes from this group called Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulator, SERM. What tamoxifen does is, it's a molecule, it's a medicine, and it sits on the estrogen receptor and blocks it. So it blocks the hormone stimulation of the cancer. 

You're really using the biology of the cancer against it, as opposed to just doing something that kills cells. It's not just a toxic substance. It's manipulating the hormone receptor pathways to cause the cancers to either be suppressed or, or to die.

Katie Hafner: In this way, tamoxifen acts like a key broken off in a lock. It keeps that lock from being opened. This was a radical departure from the way cancer was treated at the time.

Ben Anderson: I think that what's really impressive about what Dora did, and what others who were making progress in similar areas, was just how limited their tools were for these purposes. But I think from what I understand, not only was she good at working with the medicine, but she was thoughtful about where this might go and how it might be used in the best way.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Susan Galbraith, Head of Oncology Research and Development at AstraZeneca, agrees that it was the team's ability to look at different possibilities for the compound that led to new discoveries.

Susan Galbraith: So that was what was exciting to the team.

Katie Hafner:. Their hypothesis that an anti-estrogen could work against cancer took time to prove, but it paid off in incredible patient outcomes. The more they tested it, the more encouraged they were by the results.

Susan Galbraith: And again, different from what the original idea had been behind that project, but rapid adaptation into something which was applicable. And I think it was very exciting for the team altogether to sort of see those early results.

Katie Hafner: Adaptation. That was key. 

Ben Anderson: And so the recognition that tamoxifen had something beyond the fertility roles that it wasn't panning out so well for, but recognizing, say, this might do something really important in another area, that's what genius is like.

Katie Hafner: Genius is a good way of putting it, and clearly in the early development of tamoxifen there was a whole lot of genius going around, which raises the question, why have we forgotten the geniuses who were there at the very beginning?

More after the break.

Katie Hafner: And so we return to what's missing. In our last episode, Michael Dukes described Dora Richardson as an Agatha Christie-type character, and we could’ve used an Agatha Christie character to help us find her. But aside from Viviane Quirke, and us, it's not as if anyone's been looking for her. In addition to that, Dora made herself hard to find.

Michael Dukes has an idea as to why. 

Michael Dukes: I think because she didn't make much noise. You know, most chemists who have made a drug then tend to, you know, make a fair bit of noise about it themselves. Probably go to meetings, you know, scientific meetings and present on it where, you know, again, Dora, I don't think, did much of that.

Katie Hafner: And if Dora is to be summed up in one word, Michael Dukes thinks that selfless is an apt one.

Michael Dukes: I think that's the best word. She wasn't looking for her own personal sort of advancement in that sense.

Katie Hafner: But selflessness alone is not enough to explain a disappearance, at least not in this case. 

In 1974, as tamoxifen saw increased success in patient trials just after it was launched in the UK, someone new joined the team, a pharmacologist named Craig Jordan.

Katie Hafner: To this day, his is the name usually associated with the success of the drug, and his name is often accompanied by this description, the father of tamoxifen. Craig Jordan first came to Alderley Park as a summer student in 1967 and later in 1972, as a Ph.D. candidate. Dr. Walpole was assigned as Craig Jordan's thesis examiner, and Craig Jordan would stay close to ICI and tamoxifen for decades, working to expand its use in a growing list of patients.

But he overshadowed the people who had been on the team up to that point, including Dora. Historian Viviane Quirke has an opinion about that.

Viviane Quirke: He was publishing so much, he was drowning everybody in papers, you know?

Katie Hafner: In other words, he was drowning everyone else out. At least, that's how I'm interpreting it.

Craig Jordan would go on to write and speak about tamoxifen for the rest of his life. There's no shortage of information about how the drug was brought to market and Craig Jordan's role in that success. 

But when the spotlight shifted towards Dr. Jordan, it shifted away from the team that had been pushing the research forward for 14 years before he got there.

Katie Hafner: There's no doubt that Craig Jordan had a major role to play in this odyssey, guiding tamoxifen through the lengthy clinical, legal, and regulatory battles. Craig Jordan was also a force behind the expanded uses of tamoxifen, including among younger women. But as far as we can tell, Craig Jordan mentioned Dora only briefly, if he mentioned her at all.

In a paper on the 50th anniversary of tamoxifen's first clinical trial, he cited her once. He called her, quote, “a talented organic chemist.” And that was it. Barbara Valcaccia finds this unfair.

Barbara Valcaccia: Her work was so important and she is so rarely mentioned as having anything to do with it.

Katie Hafner: And Craig Jordan had the megaphone.

Michael Dukes: That he managed to speak louder and more often, he became associated with it.

Katie Hafner: To give you an example of just how disconnected Craig Jordan was from tamoxifen's early development, there's this. In early 1975, tamoxifen was caught up in a patent dispute in the United States. Michael Dukes was there, and so was Dora Richardson. Craig Jordan was not.

Michael Dukes: I mean, the last time I saw her was at the trial in Washington, the, uh, federal circuit trial when ICI took the American Patent Office to court. We sued them for their failure to apply the law correctly, and as a result denied the tamoxifen, the 46474 patent.

Katie Hafner: At that trial, it was Dora Richardson, not Craig Jordan, who was called as a witness, perhaps for one simple reason.

Craig Jordan had not been there at the beginning. But he knew a good product when he saw it, and he knew how to position that product in the market. And for that, he deserves credit.

Barbara Valcaccia: It's just that Craig had a particular type of personality. He was a self-publicist, but he moved in on something that was going to be successful and made sure his name was associated with it.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Benjamin Anderson, who knew Craig Jordan, believes he would have recognized Dora Richardson's role, if asked.

Ben Anderson: Dr. Jordan became known as Dr. Tamoxifen, but I think he would have been the first to stand up and say, I was standing on the shoulders of others. And, uh, Dora, I think, was one of those.

Katie Hafner: When tamoxifen was finally launched in the U.K. in 1973, it was for the treatment of advanced breast cancer. It was an encouraging sign, but it didn't meet with much fanfare. An in house ICI paper stated, “Whilst it is not a breakthrough drug and is not expected to achieve major sales, Nolvadex is nevertheless one of the most significant drugs to result from the division's research program.”

You can say that again. Because today, the uses for tamoxifen have increased exponentially from that underwhelming description, along with the patient populations that it treats. Here's Susan Galbraith again.

Susan Galbraith: If you think about the impact that this particular drug has had on the outcome for breast cancer, the understanding of how we can change the, you know, the hormonal drive for that disease and led to a whole series of other drugs, a whole range of other hormonal therapies for breast cancer that this finding triggered. It's a remarkable impact.

Ben Anderson: Tamoxifen reduced recurrence rates by about half and cut mortality statistics in ballpark figure, 50%. That is a really big number in oncology.

Katie Hafner: Once it's determined that a tumor is estrogen receptor positive, tamoxifen can be prescribed. And, because it's well tolerated, it doesn't require any monitoring over the course of treatment. That makes it extremely accessible.

Ben Anderson: You know, what do you need? You need a pharmacy. And, and so, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, uh, Latin America, you don't have to go to the super fancy hospital to get this prescription that you take once a day for five to ten years.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Anderson explains that tamoxifen is so important to global health, it's on the WHO's list of most essential medicines.

Ben Anderson: WHO created this concept of the essential medicines list. They've gone through pulling on expert opinion and knowledge. They've identified medicines that have a big bang for your buck. These are effective medicines and they're appropriate to have. It's important guidance.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Anderson believes that this kind of accomplishment is possible only when a team pushes a revolutionary idea forward.

Ben Anderson: And so it's that thinking out of the box. And I think that the work that Dora and others on this team did, they fit in that realm. And it isn't just about one person. It's about our system of science overall.

And isn't it awesome that we all get to participate in this and see the benefits when we are able to bring it to the public.

Katie Hafner: And here, Susan Galbraith of AstraZeneca echoes something that Dr. Anderson said earlier.

Susan Galbraith: We stand on the shoulders of the people that have gone before.

Katie Hafner: But wouldn't it be better if we knew whose shoulders today's scientists are standing on? Or is that just wishful thinking? 

I mean, is it really so surprising not to know the developer of an effective treatment? Do I know, for example, the name of the scientist who developed the Ibuprofen I took from my headache this morning? I don't. Historian Viviane Quirke.

Viviane Quirke: The chemists who make things aren't usually the big heroes of the story, whether they're male or female.

Nevertheless, The fact that there's this female chemist, and there weren't that many, especially synthetic chemists, making a breast cancer drug needs highlighting.

Katie Hafner: That is an understatement. In his own version of the history of tamoxifen, Craig Jordan wrote, “History is lived forward, but is written in retrospect.”

That was perceptive of him. Maybe he was looking back from his perch on Dora's shoulders and failed to notice who was below him. But depending on who is looking back, it's easy to see how certain characters get completely left out. Dora Richardson, who toiled away in Lab 8S14 to synthesize tamoxifen, is essentially unknown.

Katie Hafner: On July 3rd, 2024,“The New York Times” published Craig Jordan's obituary and described him thusly in its first sentence: “V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells, opened up a whole new class of drugs, and helped save the lives of millions of women.”

We sometimes like to say that at “Lost Women of Science,” we're not mad, we're curious. Okay, we're a little mad. So yes, we're a little angry that the newspaper of record has credited Craig Jordan with being not merely the father of tamoxifen, but its discoverer. This is what people will come to believe, but it is simply untrue.

Katie Hafner: At “Lost Women of Science,” we believe that the true origins of scientific discoveries matter. We care about getting the historical record right, and we believe that the rest of the world should care too. But why does it matter? Because the truth matters. Giving credit where credit is rightly due matters.

If a building or a street is going to be named for someone who created something important, make sure it's the right someone. Here's Viviane Quirke again. 

Viviane Quirke: This is a breast cancer drug that saved the lives of women. I think the fact that it's a female chemist who synthesized a breast cancer drug is significant.

Katie Hafner: Michael Dukes describes Dora Richardson as a woman from a particular time and place that required behavior that many women today would find unimaginable and unacceptable.

Michael Dukes: She didn't, in any way, come over to me as a feminist in the sense that we're being downtrodden and all the rest of it, even though she had every reason to be. Because, of course, up until, I think, the early 70s, women in industry in Britain were only paid 80 percent of what their equivalent males were being paid.

Katie Hafner: Even if Dora wouldn't have been called a feminist, from the fragments of her life that we know of outside of ICI, we know that she was a founding member of the local Soroptimists Club. The Soroptimists are still around today and they encourage the empowerment of women through education. Michael Dukes also believes that although Dora was quiet about it, she was well aware of the pivotal role she played in the success of tamoxifen in treating breast cancer.

Michael Dukes: I think she was kept informed. I mean, it was in the press. She knew what it was achieving. I think she would have had, you know, drawn quiet satisfaction, pride, she was entitled to, you know, she had changed the planet in that sense.

Katie Hafner: Dr. Arthur Walpole retired from ICI in 1977 and he died unexpectedly six months later at age 64.

Sadly, he never got to see the full extent of his life's work. In Dr. Walpole's hometown of Wilmslow, England, just three miles from the old ICI headquarters, there's now a Walpole Way named after him, thanks to the efforts of Michael Dukes. It's a small tribute to a man who some say should have been considered for a Nobel Prize.

Katie Hafner: It is some comfort to know that Dora Richardson lived to see tamoxifen's impact on women's health. And, before she retired, she also saw ICI's revenues explode thanks to tamoxifen. Dora's history of Nolvadex states that in 1980, its estimated actual sales worldwide were 30 million pounds.

Or around 200 million dollars in today's money. 

Viviane Quirke: So her unpublished history finishes with, “Oh, ye of little faith.” 

Michael Dukes: “Oh ye of little faith.”

Julie James: “Oh, ye of little faith” is a last sentence. That says it all, doesn't it really?

Katie Hafner: The global market for tamoxifen is expected to reach over $712 million dollars in 2032. 

When Dora Richardson retired from ICI in 1979, there was an informal send off for her. Her lab manager at the time made a few remarks thanking Dora for her service. She graciously accepted and said in response, “I have had a very gratifying and fulfilling career. Nolvadex is a once in a lifetime discovery and I feel lucky that I was in on it. I feel I have done something with my life.”

Katie Hafner: According to an ICI article, the division gave her the following going away gifts. A pair of binoculars. A radio cassette player. Some cut glass. And a book. That sounds so British. So restrained. So of its time. So small, it's almost heartbreaking. 

But if there's one thing we've learned about Dora, it's that she wasn't comfortable being singled out. It's also worth remembering that Dora's lifelong dream had been to work as a chemist in cancer research. And with that in mind, I think we can feel confident that Dora's true gratification might have been felt in other ways.

Like on this otherwise ordinary day back at the ICI lab, when early trial results were coming in. 

Barbara Valcaccia: It was just after lunch one day, and we were all starting to work again. Dora burst into the lab and she was so excited, and she got this paper in her hand and she said “read it, read it.” So we read it and she couldn't keep still. She was hopping from one foot to the other. She was so excited and it was a letter from a patient who had been treated with tamoxifen and had recovered from a breast tumor. 

Katie Hafner: That patient was so grateful that she had written to ICI to find out who had developed the treatment that saved her. 

Barbara Valcaccia: She'd sought out the information about how the drug came, came to be made or who made it. And who was the chemist who synthesized it. 

And she'd actually written to the company, asking that, that Dora should be Uh, thanked for what she'd done. And Dora got this letter, and she was happy, embarrassed, delighted, grateful, because normally in that sort of work, nobody gets in touch with you, if you manage to get a drug onto the market.

You've got a drug onto the market and that's that, and you move on to something else. Uh, but somebody had taken the trouble to write in and then say thank you for doing it, and she was so happy.

Katie Hafner: When we found that long lost paper with the help of archivist Julie James, she had this to say. 

Julie James: It's lovely to think that someone's took the time to look back at who actually really did the science behind it and bring her forward into the limelight. Probably a little bit too late, but yeah.

Katie Hafner: She's right. It is a little late. We wish this had happened a long time ago. And now we think of this as our little pink ribbon to Dora. A reminder about the importance of recognizing those who have made a difference in our lives. Who have, in some cases, saved our lives. And because of that, deserve our sincere gratitude. 

This is a long overdue shout out to a person who made very little noise and who probably wouldn't have wanted a shout out at all. But to rediscover Dora Richardson in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month feels especially poignant. 

Katie Hafner: Getting a breast cancer diagnosis is frightening at any time. And knowing that Dora Richardson never gave up on her research to find a better treatment, we hope, is both reassuring and inspirational. 

Thank you, Dora, on behalf of all the women tamoxifen has helped, and all the women tamoxifen will help. Thank you for your patience, your courage, and your brilliant mind.

Katie Hafner: 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 Lizzie Younan. We had fact checking help from Lexi Atiya. Lily Whear created the art. 

Special thanks go to Dr. Susan Galbraith, who's on our advisory board and who first brought Dora 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 Burtner, our program manager. 

Thanks also to Jeff DelViscio at our publishing partner, “Scientific American.” We're distributed by PRX. For a transcript of this episode and for more information about Dora Richardson, please visit our website lostwomenofscience.org and sign up so you'll never miss an episode. I'm Katie Hafner. See you next time.