Who was Dorothy Hodgkin?
A British chemist who used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structures of biologically critical molecules — including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — and who remains the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in a science category.
What the technique does. Firing X-rays at a crystal produces a diffraction pattern, from which the positions of atoms can be calculated. The calculation is the hard part, and before computers it was done by hand, over years, with mathematical methods that had to be developed alongside the chemistry.
Penicillin. She determined its structure in 1945, during and shortly after the war, when its manufacture was a strategic priority. Establishing the structure — including the contested beta-lactam ring — made synthetic modification possible, which is the foundation of the entire family of semi-synthetic penicillins that followed.
Vitamin B12, solved in 1956 and vastly more complex, with around a hundred atoms. It was described as breaking sound barriers in structural chemistry, and it won her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
Insulin, which she worked on for 34 years, finally solving it in 1969. It is the achievement she regarded most highly, and it underpins modern diabetes treatment and insulin analogue design.
The circumstances. She developed rheumatoid arthritis in her twenties, which progressively deformed her hands, and continued working with instruments throughout a long career. She worked at Oxford in a period when women were excluded from some senior common rooms and from full membership of the chemistry faculty club.
Her wider activity. She was politically active in disarmament and international scientific cooperation, travelling to China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam during periods when that was contentious, and was for years refused a US visa on those grounds.
She taught Margaret Thatcher chemistry at Oxford, and the two maintained contact across profound political disagreement.
She held the Order of Merit, and the fact that she remains the only British woman with a science Nobel is itself a notable statistic.