Biographies
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994)
Dorothy Hodgkin became interested in Chemistry and in crystals at about the age of 10 and on her 16th birthday received a book by William Henry Bragg about using X-rays to analyse the structural arrangement of atoms in crystals. She had found her life’s work. She graduated in Chemistry from Somerville College Oxford and came to Cambridge in 1932 to work with J.D Bernal; she was at this stage a graduate student at Newnham College. She then returned to Somerville and Oxford where she worked for most of her career, solving the puzzle of the structure of various biologically interesting and important molecules, including insulin, penicillin and vitamin B12. Her results, using molecular structure to explain biological function, changed the face of modern biology and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, thus becoming the fifth woman and the first British woman to win a Nobel Prize. In addition to her distinction as a research scientist, she was an inspired teacher with a reputation as a warm and caring person who opened her home to all types of people and formed close friendships with scientists from all over the world. She had 3 children.
To read further
- Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life, Georgina Ferry, Granta Books, 1998
