Dorothy Hodgkin

For more information on Dorothy Mary Hodgkin, visit Britannica.com.

British chemist (1910–1994)

Born Dorothy Crowfoot in Cairo, Egypt, she was educated at Somerville College, Oxford. After a brief period as a postgraduate student at Cambridge University, she returned to Oxford in 1934 and spent her entire academic career there. She served as Wolfson Research Professor of the Royal Society from 1960 until 1977.

Hodgkin had the good fortune to fall under the influence of the inspiring and scientifically imaginative physicist J. D. Bernal at Cambridge. Bernal was keen to use the technique of x-ray diffraction analysis, introduced by Max von Laue in 1912, to investigate important complex organic molecules. He gathered around him a group of enthusiastic scientists to work out the appropriate techniques. Of the Bernal group, Hodgkin was probably the most talented; she also possessed a greater single mindedness than Bernal himself and, despite the demands of three young children and a busy political life, it was her persistence and talent that produced some of the first great successes of x-ray analysis.

Her first major result came in 1949 when, with Charles Bunn, she published the three-dimensional structure of penicillin. This was followed by the structure of vitamin B₁₂ (by 1956) and, in 1969, that of insulin. For her work on vitamin B₁₂ she was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964.

(1910-1994) British chemist; Nobel Prize 1964 for her work on determination of biological structures by X-ray crystallography.

For her work with vitamin B-12, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin employed the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the molecular structures of several large biochemical molecules. When she received the 1964 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her accomplishments, the committee cited her contribution to the determination of the structure of both penicillin and vitamin B ₁₂.

Hodgkin was born in Egypt on May 12, 1910 to John and Grace (Hood) Crowfoot. She was the first of four daughters. Her mother, although not formally educated beyond finishing school, was an expert on Coptic textiles, and an excellent amateur botanist and nature artist. Hodgkin's father, a British archaeologist and scholar, worked for the Ministry of Education in Cairo at the time of her birth, and her family life was always characterized by world travel. When World War I broke out, Hodgkin and two younger sisters were sent to England for safety, where they were raised for a few years by a nanny and their paternal grandmother. Because of the war, their mother was unable to return to them until 1918, and at that time brought their new baby sister with her. Hodgkin's parents moved around the globe as her father's government career unfolded, and she saw them when they returned to Britain for only a few months every year. Occasionally during her youth she travelled to visit them in such far-flung places as Khartoum in the Sudan, and Palestine.

Hodgkin's interest in chemistry and crystals began early in her youth, and she was encouraged both by her parents as well as by their scientific acquaintances. While still a child, Hodgkin was influenced by a book that described how to grow crystals of alum and copper sulfate and on X rays and crystals. Her parents then introduced her to the soil chemist A. F. Joseph and his colleagues, who gave her a tour of their laboratory and showed her how to pan for gold. Joseph later gave her a box of reagents and minerals which allowed her to set up a home laboratory. Hodgkin was initially educated at home and in a succession of small private schools, but at age eleven began attending the Sir John Leman School in Beccles, England, from which she graduated in 1928. After a period of intensive tutoring to prepare her for the entrance examinations, Hodgkin entered Somerville College for women at Oxford University. Her aunt, Dorothy Hood, paid the tuition to Oxford, and helped to support her financially. For a time, Hodgkin considered specializing in archaeology, but eventually settled on chemistry and crystallography.

Crystallography was a fledgling science at the time Hodgkin began, a combination of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Max von Laue, William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg had essentially invented it in the early decades of the century (they had won Nobel Prizes in 1914 and 1915, respectively) when they discovered that the atoms in a crystal deflected X rays. The deflected X rays interacted or interfered with each other. If they constructively interfered with each other, a bright spot could be captured on photographic film. If they destructively interfered with each other, the brightness was cancelled. The pattern of the X-ray spots - diffraction pattern - bore a mathematical relationship to the positions of individual atoms in the crystal. Thus, by shining X rays through a crystal, capturing the pattern on film, and doing mathematical calculations on the distances and relative positions of the spots, the molecular structure of almost any crystalline material could theoretically be worked out. The more complicated the structure, however, the more elaborate and arduous the calculations. Techniques for the practical application of crystallography were few, and organic chemists accustomed to chemical methods of determining structure regarded it as a black art.

After she graduated from Oxford in 1932, Hodgkin's old friend A. F. Joseph steered her toward Cambridge University and the crystallographic work of J. D. Bernal. Bernal already had a reputation in the field, and researchers from many countries sent him crystals for analysis. Hodgkin's first job was as Bernal's assistant. Under his guidance, with the wealth of materials in his laboratory, the young student began demonstrating her particular talent for X-ray studies of large molecules such as sterols and vitamins. In 1934, Bernal took the first X-ray photograph of a protein crystal, pepsin, and Hodgkin did the subsequent analysis to obtain information about its molecular weight and structure. Proteins are much larger and more complicated than other biological molecules because they are polymers - long chains of repeating units - and they exercise their biochemical functions by folding over on themselves and assuming specific three-dimensional shapes. This was not well understood at the time, however, so Hodgkin's results began a new era; crystallography could establish not only the structural layout of atoms in a molecule, even a huge one, but also the overall molecular shape which contributed to biological activity.

In 1934, Hodgkin returned to Oxford as a teacher at Somerville College, continuing her doctoral work on sterols at the same time. (She obtained her doctorate in 1937). It was a difficult decision to move from Cambridge, but she needed the income and jobs were scarce. Somerville's crystallography and laboratory facilities were extremely primitive; one of the features of her lab at Oxford was a rickety circular staircase that she needed to climb several times a day to reach the only window with sufficient light for her polarizing microscope. This was made all the more difficult because Hodgkin suffered most of her adult life from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, which didn't respond well to treatment and badly crippled her hands and feet. Additionally, Oxford officially barred her from research meetings of the faculty chemistry club because she was a woman, a far cry from the intellectual comradery and support she had encountered in Bernal's laboratory. Fortunately, her talent and quiet perseverance quickly won over first the students and then the faculty members at Oxford. Sir Robert Robinson helped her get the money to buy better equipment, and the Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a series of small grants. She was asked to speak at the students' chemistry club meetings, which faculty members also began to attend. Graduate students began to sign on to do research with her as their advisor.

An early success for Hodgkin at Oxford was the elucidation of cholesterol iodide's molecular structure, which no less a luminary than W.H. Bragg singled out for praise. During World War II, Hodgkin and her graduate student Barbara Low worked out the structure of penicillin, from some of the first crystals ever made of the vital new drug. Penicillin is not a particularly large molecule, but it has an unusual ring structure, at least four different forms, and crystallizes in different ways, making it a difficult crystallographic problem. Fortunately they were able to use one of the first IBM analog computers to help with the calculations.

In 1948, Hodgkin began work on the structure of vitamin B-12 the deficiency of which causes pernicious anemia. She obtained crystals of the material from Dr. Lester Smith of the Glaxo drug company, and worked with a graduate student, Jenny Glusker, an American team of crystallographers led by Kenneth Trueblood, and later with John White of Princeton University. Trueblood had access to state of the art computer equipment at the University of California at Los Angeles, and they sent results back and forth by mail and telegraph. Hodgkin and White were theoretically affiliated with competing pharmaceutical firms, but they ended up jointly publishing the structure of B-12 in 1957; it turned out to be a porphyrin, a type of molecule related to chlorophyll, but with a single atom of cobalt at the center.

After the war, Hodgkin helped form the International Union of Crystallography, causing Western governments some consternation in the process because she insisted on including crystallographers from behind the Iron Curtain. Always interested in the cause of world peace, Hodgkin signed on with several organizations that admitted Communist party members. Recognition of Hodgkin's work began to increase markedly, however, and whenever she had trouble getting an entry visa to the U.S. because of her affiliation with peace organizations, plenty of scientist friends were available to write letters on her behalf. A restriction on her U.S. visa was finally lifted in 1990 after the Soviet Union disbanded.

In 1947, she was inducted into the Royal Society, Britain's premiere scientific organization. Professor Hinshelwood assisted her efforts to get a dual university/college appointment with a better salary, and her chronic money problems were alleviated. Hodgkin still had to wait until 1957 for a full professorship, however, and it was not until 1958 that she was assigned an actual chemistry laboratory at Oxford. In 1960 she obtained the Wolfson Research Professorship, an endowed chair financed by the Royal Society, and in 1964 received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. One year later, she was awarded Britain's Order of Merit, only the second woman since Florence Nightingale to achieve that honor.

Hodgkin still wasn't done with her research, however. In 1969, after decades of work and waiting for computer technology to catch up with the complexity of the problem, she solved the structure of insulin. She employed some sophisticated techniques in the process, such as substituting atoms in the insulin molecule, and then comparing the altered crystal structure to the original. Protein crystallography was still an evolving field; in 1977 she said, in an interview with Peter Farago in the Journal of Chemical Education, "In the larger molecular structure, such as that of insulin, the way the peptide chains are folded within the molecule and interact with one another in the crystal is very suggestive in relation to the reactions of the molecules. We can often see that individual side chains have more than one conformation in the crystal, interacting with different positions of solvent molecules around them. We can begin to trace the movements of the atoms within the crystals."

In 1937, Dorothy Crowfoot married Thomas Hodgkin, the cousin of an old friend and teacher, Margery Fry, at Somerville College. He was an African Studies scholar and teacher, and, because of his travels and jobs in different parts of the world, they maintained separate residences until 1945 when he finally obtained a position teaching at Oxford. Despite this unusual arrangement, their marriage was a happy and successful one. Although initially worried that her work with X rays might jeopardize their ability to have children, the Hodgkins had three: Luke, born in 1938, Elizabeth, born in 1941, and Toby, born in 1946. The children all took up their parents scholarly, nomadic habits, and at the time of the Nobel Ceremony travelled to Stockholm from as far away as New Delhi and Zambia. Although Hodgkin officially retired in 1977, she continued to travel widely and expanded her lifelong activities on behalf of world peace, working with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Hodgkin died of a stroke on July 29, 1994, in Shipston-on-Stour, England.

Further Reading

McGrayne, Sharon B., Nobel Prize Women in Science, Carol Publishing Group, 1993.

Opfell, Olga S., The Lady Laureates, Scarecrow Press, 1986.

Journal of Chemical Education, Volume 54, 1977, p. 214.

Nature, May 24, 1984, p. 309.

New Scientist, May 23, 1992, p. 36.

Dorothy Hodgkin
A picture of Dorothy Hodgkin at Somerville College Library
Born	12 May 1910(1910-05-12) Cairo, Egypt
Died	29 July 1994 (aged 84) Ilmington, Warwickshire, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Biochemistry
Institutions	University of Oxford
Alma mater	Somerville College, Oxford University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	John Desmond Bernal
Known for	Development of Protein crystallography Determining the structure of Insulin
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1964)

Dorothy Mary Hodgkin, born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot OM, FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a British chemist, credited with the development of Protein crystallography.

She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B12, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structure of many biological molecules such as DNA where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field of X-Ray crystallography studies of natural molecules. Besides her extraordinary scientific abilities, she was unassuming, communicative and passionate about social inequalities and peace.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Education and research 3 Insulin structure 4 Private life 5 Social activities 6 Honours 7 Cultural references 8 Timeline of her discoveries 9 References 10 See also 11 External links

Early years

Dorothy Hodgkin's photo in the Abbot's Kitchen adjacent to the Oxford Natural History Museum where she worked.

Dorothy was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot (1873 – 1959), excavator and scholar of classics, and Grace Mary Hood (1877 – 1957). For the first four years of her life she lived as an English expatriate in Asia Minor, returning to England only a few months each year. She spent the period of World War I in the UK under the care of relatives and friends, but separated from her parents. After the war, her mother decided to stay home in England and educate her children, a period that Hodgkin later described as the happiest in her life.

In 1921, she entered the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, Suffolk. She travelled abroad frequently to visit her parents in Cairo and Khartoum. Both her father and her mother had a strong influence with their Puritan ethic of selflessness and service to humanity which reverberated in her later achievements.

Education and research

She developed a passion for chemistry from a young age, and her mother fostered her interest in science in general. Her excellent early education prepared her well for university. At age 18 she started studying chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, then one of the University of Oxford colleges for women only.

She also studied at the University of Cambridge under the tutelage of John Desmond Bernal, where she became aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins.

In 1934, she moved back to Oxford and two years later, in 1936, she became a research fellow at Somerville College, a post which she held until 1977.

Together with Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl Oughton, she was one of the first people in 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson; at the time he and the other scientists were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick.

In 1960 she was appointed Wolfson Research Professor at the Royal Society.

Insulin structure

Insulin was one of her most extraordinary research projects. It began in 1934 when she was offered a small sample of crystalline insulin by Robert Robinson. The hormone captured her imagination because of the intricate and wide-ranging effect it has in the body. However, at this stage X-ray crystallography had not been developed far enough to cope with the complexity of the insulin molecule. She and others spent many years improving the technique. Larger and more complex molecules were being tackled (see timeline below) until in 1969 – 35 years later - the structure of insulin was finally resolved. But her quest was not finished then. She cooperated with other laboratories active in insulin research, gave advice, and travelled the world giving talks about insulin and its importance for diabetes. She considered solving the structure of insulin her greatest scientific achievement.

Private life

Hodgkin's scientific mentor Professor John Desmond Bernal greatly influenced her life both scientifically and politically. He was a distinguished scientist of great repute in the scientific world, a member of the Communist party, and a faithful supporter of successive Soviet regimes until their invasion of Hungary. She always referred to him as "Sage" and loved and admired him unreservedly; intermittently, they were lovers. The conventional marriages of both Bernal and Hodgkin were far from smooth.

In 1937, Dorothy married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin who was part of the Colonial Office at the time. He later became a well-known Oxford Lecturer, author of several fundamental Africanist books and a one-time member of the Communist party. She loved him and always consulted him concerning important problems and decisions. In 1961 Thomas became an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, where he remained for extended periods, and where she often visited him. The couple had three children.

Social activities

Despite her scientific specialisation and excellence she was by no means a single-minded and one-sided scientist. She received many honours but was more interested in exchange with other scientists. She often employed her intelligence to think about other people's problems and was concerned about social inequalities and stopping conflict. As a consequence she was President of Pugwash from 1976 to 1988.

Honours

Order of Merit medal of Dorothy Hodgkin, displayed in the Royal Society, London.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry medal of Dorothy Hodgkin, displayed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Apart from the Nobel Prize, she was a recipient of the Order of Merit, a Fellow of the Royal Society, The Lenin Peace Prize, and was Chancellor of Bristol University from 1970 to 1988. Council offices in the London Borough of Hackney and a Bristol University building are named after her.

Cultural references

• Dorothy Hodgkin was one of five 'Women of Achievement' selected for a set of British stamps issued in August 1996. The others were Marea Hartman (sports administrator), Margot Fonteyn (ballerina / choreographer), Elisabeth Frink (sculptor) & Daphne du Maurier (writer)

Timeline of her discoveries

Hodgkin determined the three-dimensional structures of the following biomolecules:

• Cholesterol in 1937
• Penicillin in 1945
• Vitamin B12 in 1954
• Insulin in 1969
• as well as lactoglobulin, ferritin, and tobacco mosaic virus.

References

• Ferry, Georgina. 1998. Dorothy Hodgkin A Life. Granta Books, London.
• Dodson, Guy. 2002. Dorothy Mary Hodgkin, OM. Biographical Memoir, The Royal Society, London.
• Dodson, Guy, Jenny P. Glusker, and David Sayre (eds.). 1981. Structural Studies on Molecules of Biological Interest: A Volume in Honour of Professor Dorothy Hodgkin. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
• Glusker, Jenny P. in Out of the Shadows - Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics.
• Wolfers, Michael, Thomas Hodgkin. Wandering scholar. A biography., Merlin Press, 2007

• Glusker, Jenny P. (1994). "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994)". Protein Science 3: 2465–2469. http://protsci.highwire.org/cgi/reprint/3/12/2465. 
• Glusker, Jenny P., Margaret J. Adams (1995). "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin". Physics Today 48: 80–81. doi:10.1063/1.2808036. 
• Louise N. Johnson, David Phillips (1994). "Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, OM, FRS". Nature Structural & Molecular Biology 1: 573–576. http://www.nature.com/nsmb/journal/v1/n9/pdf/nsb0994-573.pdf. 
• Perutz, Max F. (Quarterly Review of Biophysics 27: 333-337, 1994)
• Nature 371: 20, 1994.
• Royal Society of Edinburgh obituary
• Guy Dodson (2002). "Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, O.M. 12 May 1910--29 July 1994". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 48: 179–219. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4606%28200212%2948%3C179%3ADMCHO1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I. 

See also

• List of female Nobel laureates

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dorothy Hodgkin

• The People's Archive interview [1]
• CWP - Dorothy Hodgkin in a study of contributions of women to physics
• Review of Ferry's biography on the Pugwash website
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: A Founder of Protein Crystallography
• Nobel Prize 1964 page
• Her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.
• Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Awards

Academic offices
Preceded by The Duke of Beaufort	Chancellor of the University of Bristol 1970-1988	Succeeded by Sir Jeremy Morse

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Chemistry Edwin McMillan / Glenn T. Seaborg (1951) · Archer Martin / Richard Synge (1952) · Hermann Staudinger (1953) · Linus Pauling (1954) · Vincent du Vigneaud (1955) · Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov (1956) · Alexander Todd (1957) · Frederick Sanger (1958) · Jaroslav Heyrovský (1959) · Willard Libby (1960) · Melvin Calvin (1961) · Max Perutz / John Kendrew (1962) · Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta (1963) · Dorothy Hodgkin (1964) · Robert Woodward (1965) · Robert S. Mulliken (1966) · Manfred Eigen / Ronald Norrish / George Porter (1967) · Lars Onsager (1968) · Derek Barton / Odd Hassel (1969) · Luis Federico Leloir (1970) · Gerhard Herzberg (1971) · Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein (1972) · E.O.Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson (1973) · Paul Flory (1974) · John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog (1975) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

Persondata
NAME	Hodgkin, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Crowfoot, Dorothy Mary
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Medical scientist
DATE OF BIRTH	12 May 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cairo, Egypt
DATE OF DEATH	1994-07-29
PLACE OF DEATH	Ilmington, Warwickshire, England

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)