I have to shamelessly admit before seeing her 'Google Doodle' celebrating the scientists 104th birthday yesterday I had no idea who Dorothy Hodgkin was, my knowledge of key female scientists stretched about
as far as Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin. After a bit of reading ad scrolling through various wikipedia articles I discovered that she's the only British women to have won a noble prize in a science category and one of only four women to have won a noble prize in chemistry (the others being Marie Curie, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie and most recently in 2009 Ada E. Yonath).
Hodgkin studied at Oxford and then went on to do PhD at Cambridge, it is there that she first became interested by the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins. Her most notable achievement is the discovery of the structure of penicillin in 1945 which she published in 1949 and her analysis and work into the structure of the vitamin B
12. On the day of her noble prize award in 1964 the Daily Mail reported 'Oxford Housewife wins Nobel!', a somewhat degrading headline for a pioneering scientist. She held her post as a fellow and tutor in chemistry at Oxford for an impressive 41 years, till 1977. During the 1940s one of her students was Margaret Roberts, the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who installed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing Street in the 1980s.
Hodgkin died in 1994 from a stroke in her home at Warwickshire. Her
work on X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules where knowledge of stucture is critical to an understanding of function. Also notably Hodgkin was also one of five 'Women of Achievement' selected for a set of British stamps issued in August 1996 and again in 2010, during its 350th anniversary, the Royal Society celebrates with the publication of 10 stamps of some of its most illustrious members, bestowing Professor Hodgkin wit her second stamp. She was in the company of nine men.
-Izzie
