Dorothy Hodgkin

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.

The family lived in Cairo during the winter months, returning to England each year to avoid the hotter part of the season in Egypt.

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (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.

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 1921 Hodgkin's father entered her in the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, England, where she was one of two girls allowed to study chemistry.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Her drawings are archived by Yale University.

Hodgkin developed a passion for chemistry from a young age, and her mother, a proficient botanist, fostered her interest in the sciences.

In 1928 at age 18 Hodgkin entered Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied chemistry.

She graduated in 1932 with a first-class honours degree, the third woman at this institution to achieve this distinction.

In the autumn of that year, she began studying for a PhD at Newnham College, Cambridge, under the supervision of John Desmond Bernal.

It was then that she became aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins.

She was working with Bernal on the technique's first application to the analysis of a biological substance, pepsin.

The pepsin experiment is largely credited to Hodgkin, however she always made it clear that it was Bernal who initially took the photographs and gave her additional key insights.

In 1933 Hodgkin was awarded a research fellowship by Somerville College, and in 1934, she moved back to Oxford.

Her PhD was awarded in 1937 for research on X-ray crystallography and the chemistry of sterols.

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.

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".

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born in Cairo, Egypt, 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.

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.

She was further encouraged by the chemist A.F. Joseph, a family friend who also worked in Sudan.

Her state school education did not include Latin, then required for entrance to Oxbridge.

Her Leman School headmaster gave her personal tuition in the subject, enabling her to pass the University of Oxford entrance examination.

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.