Pioneer of Molecular Structure Analysis and Nobel Laureate
Dorothy Hodgkin *1910–1994
I believe in perfecting the world and trying to do everything to improve things, but not because I know what’s to come of it.
Biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin was born in Cairo in 1910 and raised by relatives in England. She studied chemistry and physics at Summerville College, Oxford. After graduating in 1932, she started doctoral studies in Cambridge, with an X-ray struc-tural analysis of sterols. In 1934 she took up a teaching post at Oxford University and began a 35-year structural analysis of insulin.
In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, with whom she had three children. Despite suffering from serious inflamma tory rheumatoid arthritis resulting in deformities of the finger joints, she kept up her research work. She focused particularly on the use of crystallography to decipher the structures of a wide variety of biologically relevant molecules, including pepsin, cholesterol and penicillin, and those studies became her life’s work.
In 1964 Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the structural analysis of vitamin B12 that she had performed in 1955. She remained a lecturer and researcher at Oxford University until her retirement in 1977. She was also president of the Pugwash Conferences, an international organization of scientists working to reduce the nuclear threat, for which she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1987. Dorothy Hodgkin died in 1994 at the age of 84.