With the aid of electronic computing, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography to deduce the crystal structures of biochemically important molecules such as penicillin, insulin, vitamin B12, and viruses. For this work she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

Hodgkin was born on May 12, 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, where her family lived from 1902 until World War I began. She completed her primary and secondary schooling in England. In 1926, Hodgkin took the Oxford Senior Local Examination for admission to Somerville College at Oxford University. Although she earned the highest score of any young woman taking the exam, she needed to spend another year learning Latin and another science before qualifying for admission. She obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Oxford in 1931 and eventually joined John D. Bernal's research group at Cambridge University because of her interest in crystallography. While working on her dissertation, Hodgkin worked as a chemistry instructor at Somerville College, where she taught until her retirement in 1977. In 1937, the same year she received her Ph.D. from Cambridge, Dorothy married Thomas Hodgkin.

In 1947 Hodgkin became a Fellow of the Royal Society of England and received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society of England in 1956. In 1965 she became a member of the Order of Merit, the highest civilian honor in Britain. Hodgkin is the only woman since Florence Nightingale to receive this honor. After working for over thirty years, Hodgkin completed a research breakthrough--deciphering the three-dimensional structure of the protein insulin. In addition to her tireless devotion to important scientific research, Hodgkin was a champion of disarmament and world peace and was a founding member of Pugwash, an international organization founded to study problems associated with nuclear weapons.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin died on July 30, 1994 in Shipston-on-Stour, England.

1. San Jose State University Virtual Museum, The History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology: A Culturally Affirming View--Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
2. The Nobel Prize Internet Archive: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
3. Nobel e-Museum: Biography of Dorothy Crowfoot

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