Born in 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin perfected X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging using X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure.
She determined the structures of insulin, penicillin & vitamin B12, leading to tremendous advances in medicine.
@Sheril Keeping a catalogue of these women scientists whom I never heard about growing up (or after). It would have been (and is) inspiring to know we had mentors.
@Sheril
I'm tempted to say it's hard to appreciate just how difficult Hodgkin's work, complex crystallography in the pre-computer age, was.
Insight and imagination taken for granted, but an unbelieveable amount of endless hard work and tedious calculation.
@Sheril
She also had a student then known as Margaret Roberts, better known under her married name of Thatcher, who was prouder to be the first British PM from a science background than the first woman PM.
@Sheril So that's what she looks like! What an amazing woman. You may already known but she is one of the entries in Rachel Ignotofsky's brilliant book: 'Women In Science - 50 fearless pioneers who changed the world'. #rachelignotofsky#womeninscience
Wow. What a gal. Sharp as razors. Will of iron. And cute as a button. The wiki article talks about her rheumatoid arthritis. How can you think with all that pain?
@Sheril it was also X-ray crystallography that Rosalind Franklin used to discover the structure of DNA. Thanks for this post, I didn't know about Hodgkin!
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