Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin OM, born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot ( born May 12, 1910 in Cairo, † July 29, 1994 in Shipston -on- Stour, England) was a British biochemist. For their analysis of the structure of vitamin B12, she received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1987 she was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize.
Life
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the eldest of four daughters of a British colonial officials in Cairo. The parents, John Winter Crowfoot (1873-1959) and Grace Mary Hood (1877-1957), traveled a lot and therefore let their children grow up with relatives in England. Even as a young Dorothy Crowfoot was fascinated by crystals and chemical structures. When she Parsons " Fundamentals of Chemistry " read at the age of 16, she decided to study chemistry.
From 1928 to 1932 she took chemistry at Oxford, then they went to Cambridge to study under the direction of John Desmond Bernal sterols. She was entranced by the " elegance " of the then new X-ray structure analysis and obtained by this method for the first time many biologically relevant molecules including pepsin (1934 ), cholesterol (1941 ), penicillin (1944 ), vitamin B12 (1956) and insulin ( 1969).
1932 returned Dorothy Crowfoot as a teacher to Oxford. In the same year she began with the chemical analysis of insulin, an analysis that was to last 35 years until the entire structure of this substance was revealed.
In 1937 she married the political scientist Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, with whom she had three children, Luke (1938 ), Elizabeth (1941 ) and Toby ( 1946). Shortly after the birth of her first child she became seriously ill with rheumatic fever, which she did not let that stop by their research. In 1947 she was accepted as a third woman in the exclusive Royal Society. Starting in 1962, Dorothy Hodgkin was a member of the Pugwash Conference and has been actively supporting the understanding of scientists from East and West.
In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the third woman after Marie Curie (1911 ) and her daughter Irène Joliot- Curie ( 1935), which received this high honor. In 1965 she was the second woman - after Florence Nightingale - by Queen Elizabeth II awarded the Order of Merit. From the Republic of Austria, she was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art. In addition, she became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina - elected National Academy of Sciences.
Among her students at Cambridge 1946/47, was Margaret Thatcher, who write their thesis anfertigte with her in chemistry.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin literature on
- Georgina Ferry: Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life. Granta, London 1998, ISBN 1-86207-167-5.
- Jürgen Neffe: Eventually I developed a very strong will. In: Charlotte Kerner: Not only Madame Curie. Women who received the Nobel Prize. Beltz Verlag, Weinheim / Basel 1999, ISBN 3-407-80862-3.