Intro
Professor Hodgkin…
…should be much better known than she is.
Scientists admire the great determination and skill
which has always been the mark of your work.
She was a highly intelligent, highly focused scientist.
She would keep going, whatever the difficulties.
You just solve the next small problem
and eventually the whole problem will crack.
Involving what can only be described as gifted intuition.
She was a peace lover. She believed in solving problems
by dialogue and not by confrontation.
In recognition of your services to science…
She’s the only British woman scientist ever to have won
a Nobel prize…
…For chemistry.
What was it about Dorothy that made is possible
for her to achieve
the things she did,
at a time when so few women had those opportunities?
Early life
Dorothy was born in Cairo,
her father was very interested in archaeology
as was her mother.
If there was a dig, archaeological dig, she would try and join in.
She also had this amazing ability
for recognising patterns and symmetry,
and her notebooks show that, from when she was really quite young.
When World War One broke out,
Dorothy and her then two sisters
were brought back to England.
She was essentially left
as the head of the family.
She had to worry about whether there was enough money in the bank account.
Her interest in chemistry
started when she was only about the age of 10,
when she went to a little tiny primary school
where they grew crystals
and she said herself, “I was captured for life
by chemistry and by crystals.”
When Dorothy was in her teens,
one of the discoverers of x-ray crystallography
talked about this technique
that allows you to see where the atoms are in the molecule
and how they’re arranged in space,
and so she read about being able to see atoms
and said to herself there and then, “That’s what I want to do.”
Sleep
In lectures she was extremely well-known
for seemingly having gone to sleep,
and yet at the end, Dorothy would ask the most piercing question.
She clearly wasn’t asleep.
What personal qualities have helped you in the work?
In some ways, I suppose, a certain kind of foolhardiness
for going on, doing things
that other people don’t expect is quite possible to do.
Agency
I think a lot of girls grow up with a sense
that they don’t have the permission to do things they might want to do.
One of the characteristics that Dorothy’s upbringing gave her
was a tremendous sense of agency.
When she got married,
she was asked to stand down from her fellowship at college.
Eventually this was changed,
and she also managed to be awarded maternity leave.
She was the first woman to have that at the University of Oxford.
It paved the way for other women
who wanted to have a fulfilled scientific life
and also to have a family.
After Dorothy’s first child was born,
she suffered an attack of acute rheumatoid arthritis
and left her with distorted hands and feet.
As she got older, the arthritis did recur
but she didn’t let it hold her back.
International Issues
Dorothy was very much engaged in international issues
and so she was vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam
and indeed visited north Vietnam.
She did travel extensively and she made a point of visiting,
first of all, the Soviet Union, and subsequently China.
It was the height of the Cold War, but scientific relations continued
and she was always very keen to make contact.
Internationalism was a very big part of her make-up.
Nobel Prize
Dorothy remains the only woman scientist
in this country to win a Nobel prize.
The determination of the structure of vitamin B12
has been considered the crowning triumph
of x-ray crystallographic analysis.
The Daily Mail ran the headline
‘Housewife wins Nobel prize’.
The reaction of newspapers in the 60s
whenever women achieved anything
was absolutely appalling.
Modern medicine
Dorothy’s influence on modern medicine
is almost incalculable.
All the problems that Dorothy chose to work on
were problems that would contribute
to a better understanding of the body in health and disease.
Penicillin. The knowledge of its structure was enormously important
in the Second World War.
Conclusion
Its structure was not understood until she solved it.
It enabled doctors to use materials that had been synthesised
in a laboratory and apply those to the sick patients.
The way in which those drugs are made now
rely a lot on the structure that Dorothy determined.
She gave the impression
to those who didn’t know her perhaps
of being a frail old lady, which of course she wasn’t.
There was nothing frail
about Dorothy’s mind, attitude, kindness and so on.
Dorothy should be remembered for blazing a trail, really,
for showing that women can be scientists
and not only be scientists, but be extremely successful scientists.
She gave to the world the knowledge
but also the way to do it,
the determination not to give up.
If you know and think you can do it, keep working at it.
And if that’s not the definition of exceptional,
I’m not sure what is.
Thank you, Doctor Hodgkin.
