today’s scientist is dorothy crowfoot hodgkin, a british chemist. hodgkin was interested in chemistry from a young age, becoming one of just two girls allowed to study chemistry at her school. she graduated from somerville college (y’all i promise the somerville post is coming) and earned her phd at newnham college under john bernal. with bernal, she worked on analyzing pepsin using x-ray crystallography, marking the first use of the technique to analyze a biological substance and leading to breakthroughs in our understanding of proteins.
hodgkin became famous for discovering many three-dimensional biological structures, including penicillin and vitamin b-12, for which she was awarded a nobel prize. however, her longest running project was cracking the structure of insulin. she began her work on insulin in 1934. however, at that time, x-ray crystallography was not advanced enough to capture the intricacies of insulin, and she devoted many years to improving the technique. she labored on the molecule for many years, and was finally able to discover its structure in 1969, after 35 long years of hard work. her work was instrumental in paving the way for the mass production of insulin for diabetes treatment. understanding the structure of insulin allowed scientists to understand how to mass produce the molecule, as well as modify its structure for increased effectiveness in treatment.
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hodgkin’s work has lasting impacts in today’s fields of medicine and chemistry, not just for her work on insulin but also for her advancement of x-ray crystallography. she’s also a prominent illustration of the fact that discovery takes time—hodgkin didn’t make her most influential discovery until she was 59 years old.
fun-ish? fact: hodgkin was born dorothy crowfoot and was published under that name for most of her early life. it wasn’t until 12 years after she married that she began publishing under the name dorothy crowfoot hodgkin. nowadays, most institutions refer to her as crowfoot hodgkin or simply hodgkin.
slightly less fun fact: hodgkin’s husband was briefly associated with the communist party, and as such she was banned from entering the U.S. in 1953.
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(written 3/17/21)
