Dorothy Crawford Hodgkins

Dorothy Crawford Hodgkins

Early Life

Being born in a city put on the map by its archaeological history, and being the daughter of an archaeologist, Dorothy was bound to take up a career in science.

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Born: May 12, 1910, Cairo, Egypt Interests: sciences

At the age of ten, she was given a book with cystals and experiments to run on them. This made Dorothy "captured for life by chemistry and by crystals", as she put it.

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During her early days of school, she was one of two girls allowed to have chemistry with an all-male class. This certainly had a profound impact on her, as she went to Oxford and Somerville College starting in 1928 to study chemistry and (briefly) archeology, where she was given many research tasks. During her crystallography class, she was given advice from F.M. Brewer, who suggested she should study X-ray crystallography. This became what she got her Nobel Prize for many years later.

School life: one of two girls to be allowed in a science class, studyed chemistry at Oxford and Sommerville.

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Scientific Contributions

Crowfoot Hodgkins is credited with many accomplishments within the field of chemistry, specifically chemistry involving the structures of vitamins and drugs using X-rays.

Dorothy was able to solve the structure of penicillin, which, according to Georgina Ferry, a science writer, “at that time the largest molecule to have succumbed to X-ray methods” (Ferry). She was able to determine the arrangement of the atoms in penicillin. This is her most famous discovery.

Solving the structure of penicillin

Solving the structure of B12

Dorothy solved the structure of vitamin B12, which is the most complex structure of any vitamin. She found that the vitamin was based around a corrin ring.

Insulin was also solved by her, which, like the other two structures, were done using X-ray crystallography. X-ray crystallography is using aX-ray diffraction to figure out the strucutre of a crystal.

Solving the structure of insulin

Dorothy's Impact:

Her work inducted her into the Royal Academy (1947), got her a Nobel Prize (1964), and subsequently made her an influential chemist. Also within the realm of science, her work using x-ray crystallography made this technique popular and an essential form of scientific research. Without Dorothy Crawford Hodgkins, we would not know the multitiude of uses of the materials penicillin, B12, and insulin.

Crowfoot Hodgkin, D. – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1964/hodgkin/facts/> Ferry, G. (2023, July 25). Dorothy Hodgkin. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dorothy-Hodgkin