Dorothy
Crowfoot Hodgkin was born in 1910. She broke new ground in science by accomplishing a
number of achievements that benefited both science and medicine.
Dorothy
Crowfoot Hodgkin was born in 1910. She broke new ground in science by accomplishing a
number of achievements that benefited both science and medicine.
Dorothy was
born in Cairo and attended Somerville College in Oxford from 1928-1932.
There she studied archaeology and chemistry until her attentions became
diverted to x-ray crystallography.
In 1934, Mrs.
Hodgkin photographed single crystals of a protein for the first time at
Cambridge University. Her work from
1941- 1942 led her to be the first scientist to discover the three-dimensional
structure of bio-organic molecules. She
determined the structure of penicillin in 1944. By 1956, Mrs. Hodgkin had determined the structure of vitamin
B-12, one of the most complex molecules mapped at that time.
By 1969, she had determined the structure of insulin, a project which
began in 1935 that determined the six-part, 777-atom molecule.
Dorothy
Hodgkin went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1964 for Chemistry “for her
determinations by x-ray techniques of the structures of important biological
substances”. She passed on in 1994, but her contributions to science and her
memory will last forever.