Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin was a British descendant, born in Cairo, Egypt, on May 12th, 1910. She became interested in chemistry at about the age of 10, and this interest was encouraged by a doctorate friend of her parents. Dorothy was allowed to join the boys doing chemistry at school. Before entering university, she had decided to study chemistry and biochemistry. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1928 to 1932. At Oxford, she attended a special course in crystallography and decided to do research in X-ray crystallography in Cambridge, working from 1932 to 1936 with John Desmond Bernal at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1933, Somerville College gave her a research fellowship and in 1937, she obtained her PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Dorothy is known as a founder of the science of protein crystallography. She and her mentor, J.D. Bernal, were the first to successfully apply X-ray diffraction to crystals of biological substances, especially steroids, in 1934. Dorothy's contributions to crystallography included discoveries of the structures of cholesterol, tobacco mosaic virus, penicillin, vitamin B-12, and insulin (a solution on which she worked for 34 years), with the aid of X-ray diffraction techniques. Her discoveries were important because these could determine the best methods of production of penicillin, which was used to prevent wound infection during World War II. Dorothy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964, "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".

Dorothy spent most of her working life as a Fellow and Tutor in Natural Science at Somerville College, Oxford, responsible mainly for teaching chemistry in the women's colleges. She became a University lecturer and demonstrator in 1946, University Reader in X-ray Crystallography in 1956 and Wolfson Research Professor of the Royal Society in 1960.

In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, an historian. They had three children and three grandchildren. She died in 1994.