Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1964. Date of Birth: 12.05.1910 Country: Great Britain

Biography of Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot-Hodgkin was an English chemist and biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. She was born on May 12, 1910, in Cairo, Egypt. Her father, John Winter Crowfoot, was a specialist in classical English philology and an archaeologist for the Egyptian Education Service. Her mother, Grace Mary Hood, was a botany enthusiast who later described the flora of Sudan and became an expert in Coptic textiles.

During the First World War, Dorothy and her siblings were sent to England to live with their paternal grandmother in Worthing, a few miles from Brighton on the English Channel. After the war ended in 1918, Dorothy's mother returned to England and settled with her children in Lincoln. She homeschooled them in history, natural sciences, and literature. For the next three years, Dorothy's mother traveled between England and the Middle East, eventually settling in Geldstone, East Suffolk, where the Crowfoot ancestors had lived for centuries.

Dorothy attended John Leman School near Beccles until 1928. It was at this school that she became fascinated with crystals, which led her to study crystallography and chemistry. At the age of 13, she visited her father in Khartoum and conducted quantitative analysis of local minerals under the supervision of A.F. Joseph, a soil chemist. In 1926, Dorothy's father became the director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. After finishing school, Dorothy joined her parents in Palestine. While excavating Byzantine temples in Jerash, Jordan, she became interested in archaeology. However, upon returning to England, she decided to pursue the study of chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. Combining her knowledge of botany and archaeology, she applied the methods she had learned from her parents to chemical research.

Dorothy first learned about X-ray diffraction in crystals from the book "The Nature of Things" by William Henry Bragg, a Nobel laureate in Physics. She studied crystallography under the guidance of H.M. Powell at Somerville College and spent a summer in Heidelberg in the laboratory of Victor Goldschmidt, another expert in the field. After graduating from Somerville College in 1932, Dorothy received a small scholarship that, together with financial support from her aunt, allowed her to work at the University of Cambridge with the eminent physicist John Desmond Bernal. Bernal was studying the analysis of steroid molecules at the time. Their collaboration led to significant achievements in the early stage of X-ray structural analysis of globular protein crystals. In 1934, they developed a method for analyzing protein crystals immersed in a mother liquor, marking their first major success.

In 1935, Dorothy returned to Oxford, where she initially served as a tutor. With the help of R. Robinson, a Nobel laureate, she obtained a subsidy to purchase an X-ray apparatus and began analyzing iodinated cholesterol. Her work, which William Henry Bragg described as an example of using physical methods to determine complex spatial structures in organic chemistry, earned her a Ph.D. in 1937. Bernal wrote, "Her success led her old professor, Sir Robert Robinson, to say that much more could now be learned about molecular structure by X-ray structural analysis, and chemists should get on with their job - the synthesis of substances." In 1937, Dorothy married Thomas L. Hodgkin, the son of an Oxford historian and a descendant of physician Thomas Hodgkin, after whom Hodgkin's disease is named (lymphoma).

Three years after the start of World War II, Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin began studying penicillin and successfully determined its molecular structure in 1949. In 1948, she applied X-ray structural analysis to study vitamin B12 and finally determined its complex molecular structure in 1956.

In 1956, Dorothy became a lecturer in X-ray crystallography. In 1958, her laboratory moved from scattered rooms to the Natural History Museum at the University of London, where a modern building designed to meet the needs of chemical science was constructed. Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her contributions to determining the structures of biologically active substances using X-ray radiation.

She continued her research, focusing on insulin, in the 1970s and completed the analysis of zinc insulin in 1972. The work on the structure of this complex molecule, which contains almost 800 atoms (vitamin B12 consists of 90 atoms), was further complicated by the fact that insulin crystallizes in several forms. Dorothy further investigated the role of vitamin B12 in the body and modified its molecules to alter their physiological properties. She also studied lactoglobulin, pepsin, hemoglobin, and plant globulins.

Between 1960 and 1977, Dorothy held the position of Research Professor at the Royal Society in London. From 1977 to 1982, she served on the council of Wolfson College, Oxford. She was the Honorary Chancellor of the University of Bristol from 1970 to 1988 and became the President of the Pugwash Movement in 1975.

Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin remained an active member of the laboratory, stating, "There are still many complex crystals that challenge us."

Some of her notable works include "X-ray analysis of the structure of penicillin," "X-ray crystallographic study of the structure of vitamin B12," and "Structural Studies on Molecules of Biological Interest."