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Dorothy Hodgkin: Woman of Science
| Article
# : |
13018 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1987 |
3,180 Words |
| Author
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Brian Wijeratne
Brian Wijeratne learned to play cricket in Sri Lanka, where
he
was Outstanding Cricketer of the Year in 1964. Invited to
play for the MCC in 1968, he was elected a playing member in
1969 and since that time has been active as a player and a
coach. |
The scientific method explores nature through discovering an underlying order in matter. Understanding the structure below the surface, laying bare the hidden grain, makes it possible to take formations apart and assemble them in new arrangements.
The science of crystallography, more than any other discipline, has succeeded in revealing the molecular structure of compounds of great significance to science. The technique of X-ray crystallography accounted largely for the successful unraveling of the structure of the DNA molecule. X-ray crystallography had been established for nearly two decades - thanks to a number of eminent researchers, among whom were women pioneers - when Dorothy Hodgkin began its practice. By doing so, she fulfilled her lifelong ambition to study crystals, and she subsequently took up the great challenge of joining together the sciences of living and nonliving matter.
In 1932 Dorothy Hodgkin was "greatly taken" with the idea of going to work at Cambridge with John Desmond Bernal, who had been newly appointed to start research on X-ray analysis. With Bernal's group she succeeded in taking several X-ray photographs of early preparations of Vitamin B1, Vitamin D, and other crystals. Returning to Oxford, she met Ernst Chain, who had received the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology jointly with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey for their combined work on penicillin. This meeting stimulated her interest in penicillin. In the early years of World War II she worked on the structure of penicillin with the assistance of one research student and, in spite of primitive computing methods, established its molecular structure.
In 1948 she began work with Vitamin B12; gradually electronic computers were introduced and helped her solve the puzzle of the structure of Vitamin B12 - a much larger molecule than penicillin. Her discovery helped her win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964.
Hodgkin was only the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry; Marie Curie in 1911 and Irene Joliot-Curie in 1935 preceded her. In 1965, she became the first woman since Florence Nightingale to be awarded the Order of Merit - the greatest honor the British establishment can bestow on a subject. In 1947, she was the third woman to be elected to a Royal Society Fellowship, and from 1960 to 1977, Hodgkin was the Royal Society Wolfson Research Professor at Oxford University. She was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1977 to 1978 and has been chancellor of Bristol University since 1970.
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