Egypt (British parents)
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Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Cairo, Egypt (British parents)
Archival Overview
British chemist and X-ray crystallographer who deciphered the atomic structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin, winning the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry as a giant of structural biology.
Biographical Record
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994) mastered X-ray diffraction techniques at Somerville College, Oxford. Suffering from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis from her twenties, she spent decades painstakingly analyzing thousands of diffraction patterns to calculate the three-dimensional atomic architectures of biomolecules.
In 1945, she determined the structure of penicillin, proving its unexpected beta-lactam ring, followed by the complex structure of vitamin B12 in 1955 and insulin in 1969. An impassioned peace activist, she chaired the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
Key Life Milestones
Determination of Penicillin Structure
Solved the molecular beta-lactam architecture of penicillin using X-ray crystallography.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Awarded the Nobel Prize for determining the structures of fundamental biochemical substances.
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Final Resting Place
Perpetual MemorialIlmington (Warwickshire), United Kingdom