Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin a British biochemist and crystallographer and was the sole winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the highly complex structure of the vitamin B-12 molecule. She used X rays to make this discovery. Knowledge of the molecular structure of vitamin B-12 has enabled scientists to better understand how the body uses this substance to build red blood cells and prevent a disease called pernicious anemia. Her achievements included not only these structure determinations and the scientific insight they provided but also the development of methods that made such structure determinations possible.
Hodgkin devoted her career to studying the structures of complex substances
through a method called X-ray crystallographic analysis. During the 1940's, she
determined the molecular structures of cholesterol iodide, penicillin, and other
related organic compounds. In 1969, she revealed the three-dimensional structure
of insulin, a protein used to treat diabetes.
Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo, Egypt. She graduated with her first degree
from Somerville College, Oxford University in 1931 and then obtained a PhD at
Cambridge University in 1937. She
conducted most of her research at Oxford and was widely honoured for her work.
Dorothy became a tutor and fellow of Somerville College in 1936. In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, a tutor in adult education and a historian of Africa. She was made university lecturer and demonstrator in 1946, university reader in 1955 and Wolfson Research Professor of the Royal Society in 1960. One of her students was Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, the only British prime minister with a degree in science.