Born: Cairo, Egypt, May 12, 1910;Died: Shipston-on-Stour, England,
July 29, 1994
Scientific biographers do not, in general, find much correlation
between good character and great science. There are a few exceptions.
Historians have unanimously agreed, for example, that Charles Darwin
was a particularly admirable, even lovable, figure: a collegial scientist,
devoted father, faithful supporter of young colleagues, sincere, honest,
and without personal enemies.
The Darwin of our age is certainly Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. In the
words of colleague Max Perutz (Nobelist for his solution of the hemoglobin
molecule), she was "a great chemist, a saintly, gentle and tolerant
lover of people, and a devoted protagonist of peace." In a short
space it is impossible to discuss both the significance of her science
and the scope of her tireless activity for world peace.
Concentrating first on her contributions to science, she is known
as a founder of the science of protein crystallography. She and her
mentor, J.D. Bernal, were the first to successfully apply X-ray diffraction
to crystals of biological substances, beginning with pepsin in 1934.
Hodgkin's contributions to crystallography included solutions of the
structures of cholesterol, lactoglobulin, ferritin, tobacco mosaic
virus, penicillin, vitamin B-12, and insulin (a solution on which
she worked for 34 years), as well as the development of methods for
indexing and processing X-ray intensities. After the work with Bernal,
she established her own laboratory at Oxford, described in the memoirs
of her many students as an unfailingly joyful and productive environment.*
The challenges were always huge, as every new technique seemed to
reach limits that constrained the size of protein that could be successfully
solved, and each protein tackled presented special problems of its
own. Hodgkin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947 after
publishing the structure of penicillin and was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry in 1964 for her solution of vitamin B-12. The solution
of the insulin structure came in 1969, after many years of struggle.
Hodgkin and her collaborators produced a more refined solution in
1988, one that took full advantage of computational techniques that
can now reduce the time for protein solutions from years to months
or weeks.
Hodgkin was the first of four daughters of John and Grace Crowfoot.
Her father was an archaeologist working for the Ministry of Education
in Cairo and her mother, an accomplished artist, was an expert on
Coptic textiles. Dorothy married Thomas Hodgkin, an expert in African
Studies, in 1937, and they had three children.
Hodgkin's role in the arena of science policy and international relations
was a constant complement to her own scientific work. The entire family
distinguished itself over more than three decades by working in the
public arena for the cause of world peace. She belonged to many international
peace organizations and, owing to Cold War restrictions, was not permitted
to obtain a U.S. visa until 1990. Although she was over 80 and extremely
crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, she lost no time in making a grand
tour of U.S. institutions to discuss insulin, the history of crystallography,
and its future. Her talks drew standing-room-only crowds at every
stop. She suffered a stroke and died in 1994. — Maisel, SDSC
* Guy Dodson, 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). |