BioMolecules => Penicillin, B12 and Insulin.

Dorothy Hodgkin was an English chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential for structural biology. She is the only British woman scientist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Dorothy Hodgkin was born in Egypt in 1910 and came from a distinguished family of archaeologists. The family lived in Cairo during the winter months, returning to England each year to avoid the hotter part of the season in Egypt.

In 1928, age 18, Hodgkin entered Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied chemistry. She graduated in 1932 with a first-class honors degree, the third woman at this institution to achieve this distinction.

In the autumn of that year, she began studying for a PhD at Cambridge. It was then that she became aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins.

Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin, which was previously surmised by Edward Abraham and Ernst Boris Chain. In 1964, she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the mapping of the structure of vitamin B12. Insulin was the subject of one of Hodgkin’s most extraordinary research projects, and she elucidated the structure of insulin in 1969 after 35 years of work.

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Hodgkin established and maintained lasting contacts with scientists in her field abroad. At the Institute of Crystallography in Moscow; in India; and with the Chinese group working in Beijing and Shanghai on the structure of insulin.

Dorothy Hodgkin taught undergraduate Margaret Thatcher (later to become a PM of the UK) at Oxford University, and despite her being a lifelong Labour supporter, Thatcher, a conservative, hung a portrait of Hodgkin in her office during her time as Prime Minister.

Because of Hodgkin’s political activities, and her husband’s association with the Communist Party, she was banned from entering the US in 1953 and subsequently not allowed to visit the country except by CIA waiver.

She died in 1994 at the age of 84, after a stroke,