Google is celebrating the 104th birthday of Dorothy Hodgkin, renowned British biochemist, who developed the protein crystallography.
Dorothy Hodgkin was born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to parents John Winter Crowfoot who was an archaeologist and classical scholar, and Grace Mary Crowfoot nee Hood.
After World War I, Dorothy Hodgkin’s mother decided to stay home in England for one year and educate her children. She developed a passion for chemistry from a young age. At age 18 she started studying chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford. She studied for a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the guidance of John Desmond Bernal. There she discovered the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins, working with Bernal on the technique’s first application to analysis of a biological substance, pepsin.
In 1937, Dorothy married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin .
she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and She was the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Dorothy Hodgkin has a pretty long honours list. Apart from the Nobel Prize, she was the second woman recipient of the Order of Merit in 1965 (preceded only by Florence Nightingale), the first woman recipient of the Copley Medal, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
Hodgkin died on 29 July 1994 due to cardiac stroke at her home in Warwickshire, England.
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