Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

July is Disability Pride Month, so for this month’s Photos of the Month, we are looking at the remarkable life of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin through images from the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Hodgkin was a Nobel Prize-winning crystallographer, using X-ray techniques to reveal the structures of molecules such as penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin. She also lived for most of her adult life with rheumatoid arthritis, which began when she was only 24. Over time, the disease affected her hands and feet, limiting her mobility and causing chronic pain, but it did not keep her from her research or from teaching, traveling, organizing, and mentoring.

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born in Cairo in 1910 to archaeologist parents. John and Grace Mary (who went by Molly) Crowfoot worked for the colonial administration and the family returned to England every year to avoid the hottest months in Egypt. The oldest of four daughters, Dorothy first became interested in crystals at age 10; she set up a personal laboratory in the attic of the family home and studied pebbles using a chemistry set given to her by a family friend.

Still, coming from a distinguished line of archaeologists, she nearly followed her parents into the family business, but chemistry—and especially crystals—won out. In fact, her mother helped set her on her path: when Dorothy was sixteen, Molly gave her a copy of Sir William Henry Bragg’s book Concerning the Nature of Things, which introduced her to the idea that X-rays could be used to understand the arrangement of atoms in crystals. By the time she entered Somerville College, Oxford, she had decided that X-ray crystallography was the field for her.

After Oxford, Dorothy went to Cambridge to work with John Desmond Bernal, who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology. Under his supervision, she realized the potential of the technique to study proteins, and together they used it to study pepsin, marking the first application of X-ray crystallography to the analysis of a biological substance. Her PhD was awarded in 1937 based on this work.

During that time, Dorothy may have attended the 1935 Metallic State Conference, held at the University of Bristol. In the group photo above, Bernal is in the second row, sixth from the right. Among the unidentified others, Dorothy may be the woman standing two rows behind him, peeking out from behind another woman. During the conference, Bernal gave a talk on the factors that determine the crystal structure of alloys, work that Dorothy likely assisted with.

In 1934, while still working on her PhD with Bernal, Dorothy returned to Oxford for a research fellowship at Somerville College, where she would spend most of her career. Two years later she became the first fellow and tutor in chemistry at Somerville College, a position she held until her retirement in 1977. Somerville supplied her with her own lab, which she ran informally – a former student, Guy Dodson, notes in his biographical memoir of Dorothy that “lifelong friendships were established and the occasional marriage took place. The use of first names was encouraged.”

Her own marriage took place around that time. Dorothy met Thomas Hodgkin in early 1937 during a visit to the Royal Institution. They struck up a quick friendship and married in December of that year. They lived apart at first, with Dorothy at Oxford and Thomas working about 100 miles away at the Workers’ Education Association in Keele. Nevertheless, they wrote to each other daily, and their first son, Luke, was born in 1938. A daughter, Elizabeth, followed in 1941, before another son, Toby, in 1946.

By this time, Dorothy had also begun living with rheumatoid arthritis, triggered by a high fever she developed when Luke was a baby. The illness caused pain and swelling in her joints, especially in her hands, and it would progress over the decades. Still, accounts of her life often show her adapting rather than withdrawing. For instance, when she found that she could no longer use the main switch on her X-ray equipment, she had a long lever made and carried on with her work. She also became known as a generous mentor whose lab welcomed students into a lively, collaborative environment.

In the early 1940s, Dorothy’s work on three-dimensional biomolecular structures began to result in notable discoveries. First, working with one of her students, C. H. (Harry) Carlisle, she published the first such structure of a steroid, cholesterol iodide, in 1942. Then, in 1945, she helped confirm the structure of penicillin, although that research was not published until 1949. In 1947, she became the third woman ever elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, proof that she had become an established scientific figure.

Then came vitamin B12. In 1948, Dorothy began working on the molecule, which had been discovered at Merck earlier that year and whose structure was one of the most complicated that crystallographers had encountered. She finally solved the structure in 1954, and the final structure was published in 1955 and 1956. William Lawrence Bragg (son of the William Bragg who authored Dorothy’s 16^th birthday present) later compared her publication of the structure to “breaking the sound barrier,” and Dorothy was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work. To date, she is the only British woman to have been awarded a Nobel Prize for science.

One final notable discovery took nearly her entire career to come to fruition. Dorothy first became interested in insulin in 1934, but at the time X-ray crystallography had not developed enough to be able to solve its structure. She spent the next 35 years improving the technique, and in 1969, she and her team of students finally succeeded in identifying the structure. She continued to work on refining the structure of insulin until 1988. Her work was instrumental in enabling the use of insulin to treat diabetes.

Dorothy’s passion for science was never confined to the laboratory. Influenced by her mother, she believed deeply in international exchange and in the social responsibilities of scientists. She was particularly concerned about nuclear war, and she became involved in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which brought scientists together to discuss nuclear weapons, peace, and global security. She served as president of Pugwash from 1976 to 1988, the longest tenure of anyone preceding or succeeding her.

Although Dorothy is not pictured in this image from the Third Pugwash Conference in 1958, it represents her conviction that scientific knowledge should be used with care.

Dorothy also helped advocate for the field of crystallography itself. She served as president of the International Union of Crystallography from 1972 to 1975 and continued to attend conferences long after retirement. Travel became more difficult as her arthritis progressed, but she often brought a family member along for help and used a wheelchair to move between sessions at conferences. Distance sometimes kept her from meetings she would have liked to attend, but in 1993, despite increasing frailty, she surprised friends and family by traveling to Beijing for the IUC Congress, where she was warmly welcomed.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin died in July 1994 after a stroke. The impact of her life continues to ripple today, not only through her contributions to medical research, but also in the path she created for those to follow her, as in the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship awarded by the Royal Society “to support outstanding early career scientists who require a flexible working pattern due to personal circumstances, such as caring responsibilities and/or health-related conditions.” This July, we celebrate the life of a remarkable person and remember that, as The Arc notes, “when people with disabilities are included, respected, and supported, communities work better for everyone.”

Author’s note: The initial draft of this article was created with Microsoft Copilot based on an outline created by the author. It was then heavily edited by the author into a final draft, which was further reviewed by two additional members of the NBLA team.