Dr. Glusker's love of chemistry sprang from the influence from an excellent chemistry teacher as well as that of her parents, both of whom were medical doctors.  She read everything she could lay her hands on about the history of chemistry and the experiments that she could conduct using her chemistry set.  So when it came time to go to college she chose to study chemistry at Oxford (mainly because it gave degrees to women well before Cambridge did).  Dorothy Hodgkin interviewed Glusker for admittance to Somerville College which is also where Glusker spent the next six years, four as an undergraduate with Hodgkin as her tutor, and two doing graduate work on a derivative of vitamin B12.  Thus began a long-lasting friendship, one that Glusker valued as providing an example for women in science.  Glusker has been involved in studies of chemical carcinogens and enzyme at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia where she received visits from Hodgkin on several occasions.  The techniques that Glusker uses, X-ray diffraction of crystalline specimens, are those that Hodgkin contributed so much to.

Dorothy Hodgkin:  The Quest to View the Molecules of Life
Dorothy Hodgkin was an exceptional scientist, with a keen sense of observation and a determination to develop ways to establish the three-dimensional structures of large, biologically relevant molecules.  She was the first to obtain diffraction patterns of a protein (pepsin in 1934) and so knew that its three-dimensional structure could eventually be determined, as she showed with her studies of insulin, also started in 1934 and finally established in 1969.  She played an important role in trying out new structure-determining methods, assessing how well they worked, and was always conscious of possible errors in measurement and interpretation.   She established the chemical formulae of cholesterol (1937), penicillin (1945), vitamin B12 (1954) and insulin (1969) and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1964.  A delightful lady, plagued with crippling arthritis, she balanced a high-powered career with raising three children with being active in her professional organizations and those that champion individual rights.  She served as Chairman of the International Union of Crystallography and was Chancellor of Bristol University.  She and her husband, Thomas, had a great interest and delight in people and their home was a haven for students, scientists, colleagues, revolutionaries and refugees from all over the world.