Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin OM FRS HonFRSC[10][11] (née Crowfoot; 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning English chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential for structural biology.[10][12]
Dorothy Hodgkin
29 July 1994 (aged 84)
British
- Development of protein crystallography
- Determining the structure of insulin
3
- Royal Medal (1956)
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1964)
- Order of Merit (1965)
- EMBO Member (1970)[1]
- Copley Medal (1976)
- Dalton Medal (1981)
- Lomonosov Gold Medal (1982)
- Jack D. Dunitz (postdoc)[6]
- Margaret Thatcher (undergraduate)[8]
- Tom Blundell (postdoc)[9]
- Guy Dodson (postdoc)[10]
- June Lindsey (postdoc)
Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin as previously surmised by Edward Abraham and Ernst Boris Chain; and mapping the structure of vitamin B12, for which in 1964 she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hodgkin also elucidated the structure of insulin in 1969 after 35 years of work.[13]
Hodgkin used the name "Dorothy Crowfoot" until twelve years after marrying Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, when she began using "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin". Hodgkin is referred to as "Dorothy Hodgkin" by the Royal Society (when referring to its sponsorship of the Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship), and by Somerville College. The National Archives of the United Kingdom refer to her as "Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin".
Early life[edit]
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born in Cairo, Egypt,[14] the oldest of the four daughters whose parents worked in North Africa and the middle East in the colonial administration and later as archaeologists. Dorothy came from a distinguished family of archaeologists.[15] Her parents were John Winter Crowfoot (1873–1959), working for the country's Ministry of Education, and his wife Grace Mary (née Hood) (1877–1957), known to friends and family as Molly.[16] The family lived in Cairo during the winter months, returning to England each year to avoid the hotter part of the season in Egypt.[17]
In 1914, Hodgkin's mother left her (age 4) and her two younger sisters Joan (age 2) and Elisabeth (age 7 months) with their Crowfoot grandparents near Worthing, and returned to her husband in Egypt. They spent much of their childhood apart from their parents, yet they were supportive from afar. Her mother would encourage Dorothy to pursue the interest in crystals first displayed at the age of 10. In 1923, Dorothy and her sister would study pebbles that they had found nearby streams using portable mineral analysis kit. Their parents then moved south to Sudan where, until 1926, her father was in charge of education and archaeology. Her mother's four brothers were killed in World War I and as a result she became an ardent supporter of the new League of Nations.[18][19]
In 1921 Hodgkin's father entered her in the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, England,[11] where she was one of two girls allowed to study chemistry.[20] Only once, when she was 13, did she make an extended visit to her parents, then living in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where her father was Principal of Gordon College. When she was 14, her distant cousin, the chemist Charles Harington (later Sir Charles), recommended D. S. Parsons' Fundamentals of Biochemistry.[21] Resuming the pre-war pattern, her parents lived and worked abroad for part of the year, returning to England and their children for several months every summer. In 1926, on his retirement from the Sudan Civil Service, her father took the post of Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, where he and her mother remained until 1935.[22]
In 1928, Hodgkin joined her parents at the archaeological site of Jerash, in present-day Jordan, where she documented the patterns of mosaics from multiple Byzantine-era Churches dated to the 5th–6th centuries. She spent more than a year finishing the drawings as she started her studies in Oxford, while also conducting chemical analyses of glass tesserae from the same site.[23] Her attention to detail through the creation of precise scale drawings of these mosaics mirrors her subsequent work in recognising and documenting patterns in chemistry. Hodgkin enjoyed the experience of field archaeology so much that she considered giving up chemistry in favour of archaeology.[24] Her drawings are archived by Yale University.[15]
Hodgkin developed a passion for chemistry from a young age, and her mother, a proficient botanist, fostered her interest in the sciences. On her 16th birthday her mother gave her a book by W. H. Bragg on X-ray crystallography, "Concerning the Nature of Things", which helped her decide her future.[25] She was further encouraged by the chemist A.F. Joseph, a family friend who also worked in Sudan.[26]
Her state school education did not include Latin, then required for entrance to Oxbridge. Her Leman School headmaster, George Watson, gave her personal tuition in the subject, enabling her to pass the University of Oxford entrance examination.[26]
When Hodgkin was asked in later life to name her childhood heroes, she named three women: first and foremost, her mother, Molly; the medical missionary Mary Slessor; and Margery Fry, the Principal of Somerville College.[27]
Personal life[edit]
Personality[edit]
Hodgkin's soft-spoken, gentle and modest demeanor hid a steely determination to achieve her ends, whatever obstacles might stand in her way. She inspired devotion in her students and colleagues, even the most junior of whom knew her simply as Dorothy. Her structural studies of biologically important molecules set standards for a field that was very much in development during her work life. She made fundamental contributions to the understanding of how these molecules carry out their tasks in living system.
Mentor[edit]
Hodgkin's mentor Professor John Desmond Bernal greatly influenced her life: scientifically, politically, and personally. Bernal was a key scientific adviser to the UK government during the Second World War. He was also an open and vocal member of the Communist Party and a faithful supporter of the Soviet regime until its invasion of Hungary in 1956. He is a chemist who believed in equal opportunity for women. In his laboratory, Hodgkin extended work that he began on biological molecules including sterols. She helped him to make the first X-ray diffraction studies of pepsin and crystalline protein. Hodgkin always referred to him as "Sage". They were lovers before she met Thomas Hodgkin.[46] The marriages of both Dorothy and Bernal were unconventional by the standards of the present and of those days.[47]
Health[edit]
In 1934, at the age of 24, Dorothy began experiencing pain in her hands causing them to become swollen and distorted. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and went to a clinic in Buxton for thermal baths and gold treatments.[48] After some treatment, Hodgkin returned to the lab, where she struggled to use the main switch on the x-ray equipment due to the condition of her hands. She had to create a lever on her own in order to utilize the switch.[49] Her condition would become progressively worse and debilitating over time, with deformities in both her hands and feet, and prolonged periods of pain. While Hodgkin spent a great deal of time in a wheelchair in her later years, she remained scientifically active in her career.[50]
Marriage and family[edit]
In 1937, Dorothy Crowfoot married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, an historian's son, who was then teaching an adult-education class in mining and industrial communities in the north of England after he resigned from the Colonial Office.[51] He was an intermittent member of the Communist Party and later wrote several major works on African politics and history, becoming a well-known lecturer at Balliol College in Oxford.[52] As his health was too poor for active military service, he continued working throughout World War II, returning to Oxford on the weekends, where his wife remained working on penicillin. The couple had three children: Luke[53] (b. 1938. d. Oct. 2020), Elizabeth[54] (b. 1941) and Toby[55] (b. 1946). The oldest son, Luke, became a mathematics instructor at the new University of Warwick. Their daughter, Elizabeth, followed her father's career as a historian. Their younger son, Toby, studied botany and agriculture. Overall, Thomas Hodgkin spent extended periods of time in West Africa, where he was enthusiastic supporter and chronicler of the emerging postcolonial states.
Aliases[edit]
Hodgkin published as "Dorothy Crowfoot" until 1949, when she was persuaded by Hans Clarke's secretary to use her married name on a chapter she contributed to The Chemistry of Penicillin. By then she had been married for 12 years, given birth to three children and been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).[56]
Thereafter she would publish as "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin", and this was the name used by the Nobel Foundation in its award to her and the biography it included among other Nobel Prize recipients;[56] it is also what the Science History Institute calls her.[57][58] For simplicity's sake, Hodgkin is referred to as "Dorothy Hodgkin" by the Royal Society, when referring to its sponsorship of the Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship,[59] and by Somerville College, after it inaugurated the annual lectures in her honour.
The National Archives of the United Kingdom refer to her as "Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin"; on a variety of plaques commemorating places where she worked or lived, e.g. 94 Woodstock Road, Oxford, she is "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin". In 2022, the Department of Biochemistry in Oxford renamed its much expanded building after Hodgkin, calling it the "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Building".[60]
Contacts with scientists abroad[edit]
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Hodgkin established and maintained lasting contacts with scientists in her field abroad—at the Institute of Crystallography in Moscow; in India; and with the Chinese group working in Beijing and Shanghai on the structure of insulin.
Her first visit to China was in 1959. Over the next quarter century, she travelled there seven more times, the last visit a year before her death.[61] Particularly memorable was the visit in 1971 after the Chinese group themselves independently solved the structure of insulin, later than Hodgkin's team but to a higher resolution. During the subsequent three years, 1972–1975, when she was President of the International Union of Crystallography she was unable to persuade the Chinese authorities, however, to permit the country's scientists to become members of the Union and attend its meetings.
Her relations with a supposed scientist in another "People's Democracy" had less happy results. At the age of 73, Hodgkin wrote a foreword to the English edition of Stereospecific Polymerization of Isoprene, published by Robert Maxwell as the work of Elena Ceaușescu, wife of Romania's communist dictator. Hodgkin wrote of the author's "outstanding achievements" and "impressive" career.[62] Following the overthrow of Ceausescu during the Romanian Revolution of 1989, it was revealed that Elena Ceausescu had neither finished secondary school nor attended university. Her scientific credentials were a hoax, and the publication in question was written for her by a team of scientists to obtain a fraudulent doctorate.[63]
Political views and activities[edit]
Because of Hodgkin's political activities, and her husband's association with the Communist Party, she was banned from entering the US in 1953 and subsequently not allowed to visit the country except by CIA waiver.[64]
In 1961 Thomas became an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, a country he visited for extended periods before Nkrumah's ouster in 1966. Hodgkin was in Ghana with her husband when they received the news that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize.
She acquired from her mother, Molly, a concern about social inequalities and a determination to do what she could to prevent armed conflict. Dorothy became particularly concerned about the threat of nuclear war. In 1976, she became president of the Pugwash Conference and served longer than any who preceded or succeeded her in this post. She stepped down in 1988, the year after the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty imposed "a global ban on short- and long-range nuclear weapons systems, as well as an intrusive verification regime".[4] She accepted the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government in 1987 in recognition of her work for peace and disarmament.
Disability and death[edit]
Due to distance, Hodgkin decided not to attend the 1987 Congress of the International Union of Crystallography in Australia. However, despite increasing frailty, she astounded close friends and family by going to Beijing for the 1993 Congress, where she was welcomed by all.
She died in July 1994 after a stroke, at her husband's home in the village of Ilmington, near Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire.[13]
Portraits[edit]
The National Portrait Gallery, London lists 17 portraits of Dorothy Hodgkin[65] including an oil painting of her at her desk by Maggi Hambling[66] and a photograph portrait by David Montgomery.[67]
Graham Sutherland made preliminary sketches for a portrait of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1978. One sketch is in the collection of the Science History Institute and another at the Royal Society in London. The portrait was never finished.[58][68][69]
A portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin by Bryan Organ was commissioned by private subscription to become part of the collection of the Royal Society. Accepted by the president of the society on 25 March 1982, it was the first portrait of a woman Fellow to be included in the Society's collection.[70][71]
