New Delhi: Paying a tribute to British scientist Dorothy Hodgkin on his 104th birth anniversary, Google has posted a doodle displaying the chemical structure of penicillin on its home page. But who he was and what made him one of the most renowned scientists of his time?
English chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (nee Dorothy Mary Crowfoot) won the 1964 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for determining the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12.
Dorothy Hodgkin was born on May 12, 1910, in Cairo, Egypt and was the eldest of four sisters. Her parents worked for the colonial administration and later as archaeologists in North Africa and the West Asia.
Sent to England for studies, she had to fight to be allowed to study science along with the boys and later enrolled for a degree course in chemistry at Somerville College, University of Oxford in 1928. In 1932 she moved to University of Cambridge to pursue her doctoral research. She was initially offered a temporary research fellowship at Somerville and she rejoined in 1934 and remained with the institute till her retirement in 1977. Britain's former prime minister Margaret Thatcher was one of her students.
She married Thomas Hodgkin, a left-wing historian, in 1937. They had three children. An infection following the birth of their first child, Hodgkin developed chronic rheumatoid arthritis that left her hands swollen and distorted.
Australian pathologist Howard Florey, who had managed to isolate penicillin had in 1939 asked Hodgkin to solve its structure. She succeeded in her endeavour in 1945 and described the arrangement of penicillin's atoms in three dimensions. In mid-1950s she also discovered the structure of vitamin B12.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964 was awarded to Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".
In her later life she was involved in the cause of scientists in developing countries, especially in India and China.
Dorothy Hodgkin died aged 84 on July 29, 1994, in Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England.
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