Trailblazers
June 2026

Sanctuary celebrates Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a determined scientific researcher, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and advocate for world peace and international scientific cooperation.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994)
© National Portrait Gallery, London

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“I used to say the evening that I developed the first X-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.”
​~ Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910 – 1994) was born in Cairo, Egypt. She was an English chemist whose determination of the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12 landed her the 1964 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Dorothy Crowfoot was the eldest of four sisters whose parents, John and Grace Mary Crowfoot, worked in North Africa and the Middle East. Dorothy and her sisters were sent to England for their education and spent much of their childhood apart from their parents. Dorothy had a passionate interest in crystals as a young child and fought to be allowed to study science along with the boys. She succeeded and received a degree in chemistry at Somerville College, University of Oxford.

She then pursued doctoral research at the University of Cambridge with British physicist John Desmond Bernal, a lifelong influence, and received her degree in 1937. In Bernal’s laboratory, she extended work that he had begun on biological molecules and helped him with the first X-ray diffraction studies of pepsin, a crystalline protein.

In 1937, she married Thomas Hodgkin. They had three children. Following an infection after the birth of her first child, Dorothy developed chronic rheumatoid arthritis at age 28. This left her hands swollen and distorted, yet she continued to carry out the delicate work necessary to mount and photograph the tiny crystals, smaller than a grain of salt, that she used in her studies.

Her insulin research was put aside in 1939 when Australian pathologist Howard Florey and his colleagues at Oxford succeeded in isolating penicillin and asked Dorothy to solve its structure. In 1947, her work on penicillin was recognized by her election to the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific academy.

Dorothy strongly believed in international scientific cooperation. During the Cold War, she insisted on including Chinese and Soviet scientists in organizations such as the International Union of Crystallography, which she helped found.
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Her structural studies of biologically important molecules set standards for a field that was very much in development during her working life, and she made fundamental contributions to the understanding of how these molecules carry out their tasks in living systems. 

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Some interesting facts...

• As an undergraduate, Dorothy was one of the first to study the structure of an organic compound by using X-ray crystallography.
• She was the first woman at Oxford to receive paid mater­nity leave surrounding the birth of her first child in 1938; in fact, she was the first Oxford Fellow to give birth while in her post.
• In the late 1940s, the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher was one of her students.
• Dorothy established an X-ray laboratory in a corner of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (better known for its dinosaur skeletons and mineral collections).
• Dorothy’s soft-spoken and modest demeanor hid a steely determination to achieve her goals, no matter the obstacles in her way. She inspired devotion in her students and colleagues, even the most junior of whom knew her simply as Dorothy.
• She was appointed Chancellor of the University of Bristol in 1970.
  
• In 1972, she became President of the International Union of Crystallography. 

Learn More About Dorothy
Click cover for book information.

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