Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin was the only British woman scientist ever to have been awarded a Nobel Prize. She spent virtually her entire working life at Somerville College, as undergraduate and then as the college's first fellow and tutor in chemistry, holding that post from 1936 to 1977 — forty-one years. The three molecular structures for which she is remembered — penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin — were all worked on from Oxford laboratories.

Cairo to Somerville

She was born in Cairo on 12 May 1910, the eldest of four daughters of John and Grace Crowfoot — colonial archaeologists working successively in Egypt, Sudan and Jerusalem. Much of her childhood was spent with relatives in England while her parents worked abroad. At 10 she became interested in crystals; at 16 her mother gave her a copy of W. H. Bragg's Concerning the Nature of Things, the lectures that introduced X-ray crystallography to a general readership. She came up to Somerville in 1928 to read chemistry and graduated with a first in 1932 — only the third woman at the college to do so.

She then went to Newnham College, Cambridge to take a PhD under John Desmond Bernal, working on the X-ray analysis of sterols and on the first crystallographic study of a protein, pepsin. Her doctorate was awarded in 1937.

Return to Oxford

In 1933 Somerville awarded her a research fellowship, and in 1934 she moved back to Oxford to take it up; in 1936, at twenty-six, the college appointed her its first chemistry fellow and tutor. The post was tenured but the laboratory provision was not. She set up her own apparatus, taught her own pupils, and worked steadily through the war.

Among her chemistry pupils in the 1940s was Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher. As Prime Minister, Thatcher hung a portrait of Hodgkin in her Downing Street office out of personal respect — despite Hodgkin's life-long Labour allegiance, her presidency of the Pugwash anti-nuclear conferences from 1976 to 1988, and her 1987 acceptance of the Lenin Peace Prize.

In 1934, at the age of twenty-four, Hodgkin was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. The condition deformed her hands progressively over her career; she fitted a hand-operated lever to the main switch of her X-ray equipment so that she could continue to operate it, and in later life worked from a wheelchair. She nonetheless travelled — to the USSR, to India, eight times to China between 1959 and her death — and remained scientifically active to the end.

The three structures

In 1945, working with the biochemist Barbara Low and others, Hodgkin solved the structure of penicillin. The work demonstrated — contrary to the dominant view among organic chemists at the time — that the molecule contains a β-lactam ring. Publication was held over until 1949.

In 1948 she encountered vitamin B12, then almost unknown in structure but of obvious medical importance. She and her group worked out its three-dimensional architecture, publishing the structure in 1955 and 1956. Lawrence Bragg described the achievement as "as significant as breaking the sound barrier". It was for the B12 structure that she was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the third woman ever to win the Nobel in any discipline, and the only British woman scientist to do so, to this day.

Insulin took longest. She had been given her first sample of crystalline insulin in 1934, in her first year back in Oxford, by Robert Robinson; the X-ray techniques of the day were not yet equal to a molecule that complex. She returned to the problem repeatedly. The structure was finally solved with a team of international scientists in 1969 — thirty-five years after the first photograph. The work made possible the modern mass production of insulin.

She was made a Reader at Oxford in 1955; given a fully modern laboratory the following year; appointed the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professor (a salaried research chair) from 1960 to 1970; and became a fellow of Wolfson College from 1977 to 1983. In April 1953 she was one of the first people to drive from Oxford to Cambridge to see the model of the DNA double helix.

Honours and legacy

She was elected FRS in 1947 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1965 — only the second woman to hold it, after Florence Nightingale. In 1976 she became the first woman to receive the Royal Society's Copley Medal. She was Chancellor of the University of Bristol from 1970 to 1988.

She married the historian Thomas Hodgkin, a Balliol lecturer, in 1937; they had three children. He died in Greece in 1982; she died after a stroke at his house in Ilmington, Warwickshire, on 29 July 1994, aged 84.

In Oxford she is commemorated by a plaque at 94 Woodstock Road (where she lived); by the Dorothy Hodgkin Quarter, student accommodation at Somerville College; and, since 2022, by the renamed Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Building of the Department of Biochemistry on South Parks Road.

Sources: Wikipedia: Dorothy Hodgkin

Last verified: Fri May 15 2026 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)