A Snapshot Biography of Dorothy Hodgkin

Among the most consequential hands in twentieth-century British science belonged to a woman who could barely use them.

By the time Dorothy Hodgkin accepted the Nobel Prize in 1964, rheumatoid arthritis had been working on her fingers for twenty-six years. The joints were swollen, the knuckles enlarged, the range of motion in each hand reduced to something that would have qualified, in most professions, as a disability requiring accommodation. Yet those hands, operating X-ray equipment and mounting near-invisible crystals, determined the molecular structure of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin — three of the most consequential molecules in the history of medicine.

Her disease would never stop. But neither did she. Which may be the simplest way to understand Dorothy.

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Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born in Cairo in May 1910, the eldest of four daughters whose parents spent their working lives moving between excavation sites, colonial postings, and homes across Africa and Britain. Her father worked in the Egyptian Education Service and later became Director of Education and Director of Antiquities in Sudan. Her mother became a recognized authority on ancient weaving techniques and, in her spare hours, drew the botanical illustrations for the official Flora of the Sudan. When people expressed surprise at her accomplishments given her lack of formal academic training, she liked to say that if you spent twenty-five years working on anything, you became a world expert. In many ways, it was the kind of family that treated serious intellectual work as simply what one did, not ambition or achievement, just the texture of daily life.

Dorothy absorbed this early and completely and began refining it into a career at a young age. At ten years old, attending science classes run by the Parents’ National Educational Union, she was set to work making solutions of alum and copper sulphate. Over time, the solutions produced crystals. Something about that caught her attention. “I was captured for life,” she would say of those years, “by chemistry and by crystals.”

After that, Dorothy built a private laboratory in the smallest of the four attics in the family home, heating solutions over a Bunsen burner under the wooden rafters and filling the space with soil samples and mineral specimens. The chemistry set that stocked it had come from a neighbor in Khartoum who worked as the Sudan Government Chemist. Known to the family as Uncle Joseph, he had been so struck by her interest in minerals that he gave her the means to pursue it.

When she was around fifteen, her mother, recognizing her daughter’s talent, gave Dorothy a popular science book by Sir William Henry Bragg on the nature of atoms and molecules. The idea it planted became a question she couldn’t shake — whether it might be possible to truly see the structure of molecules directly, rather than simply inferring it from experiment. That question would organize the next seventy years of her life.

At school, the same quality of mind that would later keep her working on a single problem for decades became apparent, and not always comfortably. She wept over her mathematics homework — not when she got things wrong, but when she got them right without fully understanding why. Her sister recalled that she worked extraordinarily hard and couldn’t bear imprecision. Another sister remembered Dorothy sitting with her feet in a bath of Rendel salts, suffering from chilblains, in tears over an answer in a math problem. When her mother tried to reassure her that her answer was correct, Dorothy snapped back: “Of course it’s right, but I can’t see why!”