Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot
Born May 12, 1910, in Cairo. British chemist and biochemist. Fellow of the London Royal Society (1947).
Hodgkin studied at Oxford University (1928-32), where she began to specialize in X-ray structural analysis. In 1932 she began working at Cambridge University. In collaboration with J. Bernal, she investigated the structure of sterols, peptides, and amino acids. She carried out an X-ray structural analysis of penicillin (1946), as well as of vitamin B12 (1956), which clearly revealed the vitamin’s structure. Hodgkin was the first to establish (1961) the direct link between a metal (cobalt) and carbon in organometallic compounds (one of the Bn-coenzymes). A member of many academies of sciences throughout the world, she is a Nobel Prize winner (1964).