Dr. Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was a Bio-Chemist who
received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her "determinations by X-ray
techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances". Cholesterol, Penicillin, Vitamin B12, and
Insulin are some examples of structures she determined using X-ray diffraction
techniques.
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was born in Cairo, Egypt
on May 12th, 1910. Her father
was an excavator and a teacher of the classics, working in the Egyptian
Education Service and her mother was an expert on early weaving techniques and
was also an accomplished botanist. Both of her parents were British
expatriates. Dr. Hodgkin spent the first 4 years of her life in Asia Minor, but
moved to England
to live with relatives during World War I.
After the war, Dorothy's mother moved back to England.
Dorothy went to Oxford and Somerville College
from 1928-32 and spent her free time away from the University with her parents
excavating. For a brief time during her
first year, she combined archaeology and chemistry, analyzing glass tesserae
from Jerash. After taking a course in
crystallography, she decided to do research in X-ray crystallography, working
on dialkyl halides. After Oxford, Dorothy attended two years at Cambridge working with J.D. Bernal. In 1934 she returned to Oxford
and in 1936 became a research fellow at Somerville College
and started to collect money for an X-ray apparatus. Dorothy began researching sterols and other
biologically interesting molecules, including insulin. For the next 20 years, living in the
University museum, Dorothy and a handful of colleagues studied biological
molecules such as insulin, penicillin, and vitamin B12. In 1946 Dorothy took part in meetings, which
led to the foundation of the International Union of crystallography.
While getting her research off the ground, Dorothy married Thomas Hodgkin in
1937 with whom she would have three children, two boys and a girl. In 1960, she was appointed Wolfson Research
Professor at the Royal Society. In 1964,
Dorothy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work determining the
structure of biological substances using X-ray diffraction techniques. Dorothy died July 29th, 1994 and
was survived by her husband and three children.
Resources:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1964/hodgkin-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Crowfoot_Hodgkin
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Re: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (May 12th, 1910 to July 29th, 1994)
