Dorothy Hodgkin spent 35 years working out the structure of insulin
Using X-rays bounced off crystals, Dorothy Hodgkin revealed the shapes of penicillin, vitamin B12 and, after three and a half decades, insulin. She remains the only British woman scientist to win a Nobel Prize. One of her Oxford students, Margaret Thatcher, later hung her portrait in Downing Street.
Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo on 12 May 1910, eldest of four daughters of colonial officials turned archaeologists. At four she was left with grandparents near Worthing while her parents returned to Egypt, and she grew up mostly apart from them. By ten she was fascinated by crystals and later analysed stream pebbles with a mineral kit. At her grammar school in Beccles only she and one other girl were permitted into chemistry lessons, and her headmaster tutored her in Latin so she could pass Oxford's entrance exam. A book on crystallography by W. H. Bragg, a gift for her 16th birthday, settled her direction.
Before university she drew Byzantine church mosaics at Jerash in present-day Jordan so meticulously that she considered switching to archaeology; Yale holds the drawings. She took first-class honours in chemistry at Somerville College in 1932, only the third woman there to do so, then worked in Cambridge with John Desmond Bernal on pepsin, the first biological substance analysed this way. She stressed that Bernal took the original photographs. Returning to Oxford, she became Somerville's first chemistry fellow and tutor in 1936, a post she kept until 1977, and remained a lifelong Labour supporter despite her famous Conservative pupil.
Her results transformed structural biology. She confirmed the penicillin structure proposed by Edward Abraham and Ernst Chain, and mapped vitamin B12, which in 1964 made her the third woman to win the chemistry Nobel. Insulin followed in 1969. In April 1953 she was among the first group to drive from Oxford to Cambridge to see Crick and Watson's DNA model.
She used her maiden name professionally until twelve years after marrying Thomas Hodgkin. From 1960 to 1970 she held the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professorship. Her childhood heroes, she said, were her mother, the missionary Mary Slessor and Somerville principal Margery Fry. She died on 29 July 1994.
Source: Dorothy Hodgkin
