In 1928, at age 18, Dorothy Hodgkin started her chemistry degree at Somerville College, Oxford University.
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United States
After Somerville College, Dorothy Hodgkin moved to the University of Cambridge to earn her Doctorate degree. She was awarded her doctorate in 1937 with a thesis on the chemistry and crystallography of sterols.
Career
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
1977
British Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), February 20, 1977. (Photo by David Montgomery)
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
British biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Hodgkin showing the model of protein molecular structure. (Photo by Mondadori)
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
Portrait of the British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. 1970s (Photo by Mondadori)
Gallery of Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Hodgkin holds a photo of the molecular structure of a chemical which she made by the use of an x-ray technique.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United States
After Somerville College, Dorothy Hodgkin moved to the University of Cambridge to earn her Doctorate degree. She was awarded her doctorate in 1937 with a thesis on the chemistry and crystallography of sterols.
Dorothy Hodgkin was a Nobel Prize-winning English biochemist. She is best known for her determination of the biochemical structure of penicillin G, insulin, and vitamin B12.
Background
Dorothy Hodgkin was born on May 10, 1910, in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot and Grace Mary Hood Crowfoot.
Her father, John worked for the Egyptian Education Service as a school inspector and later moved to Sudan where he became Director of Education and Director of Antiquities. He retired from his career in Sudan in 1926 and focused on archaeology. He became the Director of Jerusalem's British School of Archaeology and went on different excavations in Samaria, Bosra, and Mount Ophel. Her mother, Grace Mary, was a botanist and took time to illustrate the different flora found in Sudan. She was also very much involved in John's work.
Education
During the First World War, Dorothy and her sisters were sent to stay with their grandparents near Worthing, United Kingdom, while her parents remained mainly in Sudan.
Dorothy's interest in chemistry started when she was just 10 years old. On a visit to Sudan, Dr. A.F. Joseph, her parents' good friend, let her study and analyze some chemicals. When she was attending Sir John Leman School in north Suffolk, England she was allowed to join the boys as they studied chemistry. By the end of her early schooling, she had already decided that chemistry was something she wanted to pursue.
When Dorothy was given the chance to visit her father in Sudan in 1923, she spent some time with her parents and helped out in the excavation in Jerash. She and her sister would also study the pebbles they found in a nearby stream using a portable mineral analysis kit, further pushing her fascination and interest in crystals and minerals. This experience almost made her give up chemistry and replace it with archaeology instead. Dorothy was given a copy of "Concerning the Nature of Things" by Sir William Henry Bragg when she was 15, and she was intrigued at the thought of being able to study the properties of atoms and molecules using x-rays.
Aged 18, Dorothy Hodgkin started her chemistry degree at Somerville College, Oxford University, before moving to the University of Cambridge to earn her Doctorate. Supervised by John Desmond Bernal, she discovered how x-ray crystallography can be used to determine the structure of vitamin D and several sex hormones. In 1934 she helped take the first x-ray photographs of the stomach enzyme pepsin. She was awarded her doctorate in 1937 with a thesis on the chemistry and crystallography of sterols.
Hodgkin was given a research fellowship from Somerville College, Oxford in 1933. She was also Somerville's first fellow and tutor in chemistry, a position she held from 1936 to 1977. During this period, she tutored the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In 1935, Hodgkin, along with her mentor J.D. Bernal, discovered that it was absolutely essential to keep the crystals wet with the liquid they are grown from ("mother liquor") while X-raying them. If the liquid dries out, the molecules start to lose their ordered arrangement, and when hit with X-rays, they don't give a clear pattern of spots.
The Second World War created a huge demand for penicillin and Hodgkin started studying penicillin hydrochloride. The structure was determined in 1945 and the three-dimensional biomolecular structure was published together with Charles Bunn in 1949.
Hodgkin's work on discovering the molecular structure of vitamin B12 began in 1948. Due to its large molecular weight, it took six years of research to complete the task in 1954. This research led her to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964.
In addition to the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964, Hodgkin became only the second woman to receive the Order of Merit, the first of which was given to Florence Nightingale. She also became the first woman to receive the Copley medal and was a winner of the Lenin Peace Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Hodgkin also became Bristol University's Chancellor from 1970 to 1988. She was given an Honorary Degree from the University of Bath in 1978.
Hodgkin was among those who determined the structure of insulin; which was published in 1969. Work on this project took over 30 years, as they started studying the crystalline insulin sample provided by Robert Robinson in 1934 when x-ray crystallography was not yet fully developed. This specific hormone took Hodgkin's interest because of the complexity of its structure-it contains 51 amino acids-and the effect that it has on the body.
Hodgkin showed great concern about social inequalities and aimed to resolve conflicts. She was president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1976 to 1988.
Whilst being a leader in her field of study, Dorothy Hodgkin was also interested in several humanitarian causes. She was a firm socialist and supported both socialist and communist governments, causing her to be banned from the United States for several years. As her fame grew, Hodgkin was increasingly asked for help in getting people, mainly scientists, released from imprisonment in the USSR. She felt that signing petitions or publicly condemning Soviet actions would be ineffective and damaging to working relationships, so instead, she wrote personal letters to her contacts in the Soviet Union. Hodgkin's political views and activism led to her appointment as president of Pugwash, an international organization which works to reduce the dangers raised by scientific research. She was president for 13 years, retiring from the role in 1988.
In the 1940s, one of Hodgkin's students was Margaret Thatcher, who was studying the structure of gramicidin B as part of her undergraduate research project. Thatcher reportedly installed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing Street during her time as prime minister and sought advice from her on both scientific issues and the conditions in eastern Europe, despite their opposing political viewpoints.
Views
In 1934, Dorothy Hodgkin began to investigate the molecular structure of insulin. However, she was serendipitously side-tracked in 1939 when Howard Florey asked for her help in his quest to better understand penicillin, the first antibiotic drug ever discovered. Florey had just isolated penicillin, and he wanted to know its structure to better understand how it worked against bacteria - so he turned to Hodgkin and her x-ray crystallography expertise.
Six years later, Hodgkin announced she had solved the puzzle, successfully unraveling penicillin's structure. This was incredibly important, as it allowed scientists to chemically synthesize penicillin in mass quantities for wide-spread use as antibiotic drugs. It was also the critical discovery needed for scientists to be able to alter penicillin’s molecules, creating other more potent related antibiotics. Ironically, the same year Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, and Ernst Boris Chain split the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery and use of penicillin.
But Hodgkin's proposed structure was not so easily accepted by the scientific community. She showed penicillin had an atomic core made up of 3 carbon atoms and a nitrogen atom in a square-shaped ring - a never-before-seen arrangement that was believed to be too unstable to exist. This now-famous arrangement, called a β-lactam ring, was in fact part of what makes penicillin so unique.
Scientists not only doubted Hodgkin's structure but also how she determined it. Racing against some of the best British chemists of the time, Hodgkin had solved the mystery not with chemical methods, but the relatively new - and still mistrusted - physical x-ray crystallography. Hodgkin's discovery made the antibiotic era feasible, saving countless lives, and triggering a major decline in bacterial infection-related complications.
But she didn't stop there - Hodgkin next turned her attention to vitamin B12, the active chemical isolated from liver extracts that was used to treat pernicious anemia. This severe disease, which was still deadly in the 1930s, is now known to be caused by a person's inability to absorb vitamin B12. Hodgkin's first x-ray analysis revealed that the vitamin contained over 1,000 atoms - multitudes more than the 39 atoms of penicillin, and certainly many more than any compound deciphered at that time by x-ray crystallography. Although Hodgkin's lab had steadily grown into a small army of undergraduate and graduate students, it wasn't until she started using computers that she was able to determine B12's structure in 1956. Vitamin B12 is now known to have the most complex structure of all vitamins.
But Hodgkin never forgot about her first interest - the structure of insulin, a huge, intricate protein produced in the pancreas that is crucial in diabetes, as it regulates the metabolism. When Hodgkin began studying it, x-ray crystallography and computing were not advanced enough to fully understand its structure. But when she revisited insulin in the 1960s, the technologies had caught up to her. In 1969, Hodgkin and her team of young, international scientists revealed insulin's structure for the first time, 34 years after she first captured an x-ray photo of an insulin crystal. Hodgkin improved X-ray crystallography methods sufficiently to understand the complex 3D structure of porcine insulin. Her research showed the overlay between the A Chain and B Chain in the porcine insulin molecule.
Quotations:
"I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals."
"Byam [Dorothy's doctor] thinks I should take a month off work, but, of course I'm not going to do that."
Membership
Dorothy Hodgkin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947 and European Molecular Biology Organization Membership in 1970.
In 1958, she was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1966, she was awarded the Iota Sigma Pi National Honorary Membership.
Hodgkin became a Foreign Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 1970s.
The Royal Society
1947
European Molecular Biology Organization
1970
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1958
Iota Sigma Pi
1966
USSR Academy of Sciences
Personality
Hodgkin's soft-spoken, gentle, and modest demeanor hid a steely determination to achieve her ends, whatever obstacles might stand in her way. She inspired devotion in her students and colleagues, even the most junior of whom knew her simply as Dorothy.
Physical Characteristics:
Dorothy Hodgkin was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis after experiencing pain in her hands for a period of time. Although she eventually spent a lot of time in a wheelchair, this did not stop her from pursuing her passion and she continued her research work.
Quotes from others about the person
Max Perutz: "She radiated love: for chemistry, her family, her friends, her students, her crystals and her college... Her love was combined with a brilliant mind and an iron will to succeed, regardless of her frail and later severely crippled body. There was magic about her person."
Interests
Reading
Connections
In 1937, Dorothy had married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, a historian. The couple had three children. Their eldest son Luke became a mathematician. Their daughter Elizabeth followed her father's career, becoming a historian, while the younger son Toby studied botany and agriculture.