First they said my structure couldn’t exist. Then when it was found in nature they said it couldn’t be synthesized in a laboratory. Then when it was synthesized, they said it wasn’t important anyway.

Dorothy Maud Wrinch

Dorothy Wrinch, approx. 1941 © Image courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

The mathematician and science philosopher Dorothy Maud Wrinch was born in Argentina in 1894 and raised in England. She won a scholarship for Girton College at Cambridge University, where she received her graduate degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1916. She was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, whose assistance and close friend she became. She lectured in  mathematics at University College London while working to attain her mathematics master’s degree, which she earned in 1920, followed by her doctorate in 1922. That same year she married John Nicholson. They had one child and got divorced in 1938. Wrinch published a book under the pseudonym Jean Ayling about the problems of raising a child as a working woman. 

[Translate to englisch:] Dorothy Wrinch’s “cyclol” model of protein structure. Made and photographed in Niels Bohr’s laboratory, 1938 © Senechal, M. (2020). Against All Odds. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences

During her time as a lecturer at Oxford she earned another doctorate in 1929, becoming the first woman to receive a doctor of science from Oxford. Until 1932 all her publications were on mathematics and the philosophy of science, but she then shifted to theoretical biology, attempting to deduce protein structure on the basis of mathematical principles. She devel-oped the “cyclol” hypothesis for the structure of proteins. Her theory was ultimately proven wrong, apart from the insights it contained on the hydrophobic effect that leads to protein folding. Wrinch moved to the United States in 1939 and held a research position at Smith College until her retirement in 1971.