Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM (May 12, 1910–July 29, 1994) was a British scientist, born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot in Cairo.

Order of Merit medal of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, displayed in the Royal Society, London

She was a pioneer of X-ray crystallography. She discovered the chemical structure of penicillin in the 1940s, which enabled it to be manufactured synthetically; and also those of cholesterol, lactoglobulin , ferritin, tobacco mosaic virus, vitamin B12, and insulin. This latter achievement took her 34 years, having started in 1933.

She studied chemistry at Oxford and Cambridge universities, before becoming a research fellow at Somerville College, Oxford in 1936, a post which she held until 1977. In 1960 she was appointed Wolfson Research Professor at the Royal Society. In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in crystallography and in 1976 the Copley Medal from the Royal Society. In 1965 she was appointed to the Order of Merit, filling the vacancy left by Winston Churchill.

References

• Dodson, Guy, Jenny P. Glusker, and David Sayre (eds.). 1981. Structural Studies on Molecules of Biological Interest: A Volume in Honour of Professor Dorothy Hodgkin. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Obituary notices

• Dodson, Guy (Structure 2: 891-893, 1994)
• Glusker, Jenny P. (Protein Science 3: 2465-2469, 1994)
• Glusker, Jenny P., and Margaret J. Adams (Physics Today 48: 80-81, 1995)
• Johnson, Louise N. (FRS), and David Phillips (Nature Structural Biology 1: 573-576, 1994)
• Perutz, Max F. (Quarterly Review of Biophysics 27: 333-337, 1994)
• Nature 371: 20, 1994.

External links

• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: A Founder of Protein Crystallography
• Nobel Prize 1964 page