Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo on 12 May 1910, where her father, John Winter Crowfoot, was working in the Egyptian Education Service.
She became interested in chemistry and in crystals at around the age of 10, and this interest was encouraged by Dr A.F. Joseph, a friend of her parents in the Sudan, who gave her chemicals and helped her during her stay there to analyse ilmenite. By the end of her school career Dorothy had decided to study chemistry and possibly biochemistry at university.
She went to Somerville College, Oxford from 1928-32 and became devoted to Margary Fry, then Principal of the College. She attended the special course in crystallography and decided to do research in X-ray crystallography. She worked with H.M. Powell on thallium dialkyl halides. She then spent two happy years at Cambridge, working with J.D. Bernal on a variety of problems. Here she became involved in recording the first X-ray diffraction pattern from a protein crystal. In 1933 Somerville College gave her a research fellowship, to be held for one year at Cambridge and one year at Oxford. She returned to Somerville and Oxford in 1934 and she remained there, except for brief intervals, ever since. Dorothy became a university lecturer and demonstrator in 1946, a reader in X-ray Crystallography in 1956 and Wolfson Research Professor of the Royal Society in 1960.
At Oxford Dorothy continued the research she had begun at Cambridge with Bernal on sterols and other biologically interesting molecules. She was able to crystallise and X-ray photograph insulin. She believed that it was possible to determine the structure of insulin by working with an isomorphous crystal by replacing a single atom with a heavier one. She chose the zinc atom to do this. She asserted that the core of penicillin was made up of a ring of three carbon atoms and a nitrogen atom. Other scientists refuted this, but Dorothy’s analysis proved she was correct. In 1955, Dorothy Hodgkin took the first X-ray diffraction photographs of vitamin B-12.
Dorothy Hodgkin took part in meetings in 1946 which led to the foundation of the International Union of Crystallography. For her work on penicillin she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947. She also became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1956, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for her work on vitamin B-12. In 1965, she was presented with the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1969, some 34 years after starting her research, she discovered the three-dimensional structure of the protein insulin.
Dorothy Crowfoot married Thomas Hodgkin in 1937. The couple had three children. In July 1994, she died, as a result of a stroke, at her home in Shipston-on-Stour, England.
So why name our awards after Dorothy? Well, not only is her work a clear example of scientific excellence in the UK, but she was only the third woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. What-is-more, she was involved in a wide range of peace and humanitarian causes. She was passionate about social inequalities. From 1976 to 1988 she was chair of the Pugwash movement, which was originally inspired by the concerns voiced in 1955 by Albert Einstein and the philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell that work by scientists - such as the creation of the hydrogen bomb - would lead to conflict and needed the insights of and input from the world's scientists. Thus she was not only a world-leading scientist but an activist for peace and international cooperation. Thus she is the ideal symbol for an award that draws together the brightest and best students from the developing world to foster scientific excellence in the UK.