Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Hodgkin, born Dorothy Crowfoot, was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, and died on 29 July 1994 in Ilmington, Warwickshire, England, following a stroke. She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1932, then earned her PhD at Cambridge in 1937 under J. D. Bernal, before returning to Oxford, where she was a fellow and tutor at Somerville from 1936 to 1977 and held the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professorship from 1960 to 1970. Using X-ray crystallography, the technique of reconstructing a crystallized molecule's atomic arrangement from the pattern its crystal casts when struck by X-rays, she determined the three dimensional structures of penicillin in 1945 and vitamin B12 in 1955, and completed, after thirty five years of work she had begun in 1934, the structure of insulin in 1969. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.