Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Crystalline Chemistry, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of
our episode on Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Where we left off

(00:22):
in part one, her last name was still Crowfoot. She
had just earned a first class degree in chemistry from Oxford.
If you have not heard part one, jumping in with
this one means you will be missing a lot of
the formative experiences in her youth that led to her
wanting to study crystals and to becoming part of the

(00:43):
field of X ray crystallography, which was still in its
infancy and really shaped her worldview. As we talked about
in Part one, X ray crystallography was a field developed
in the nineteen teens. Max Van Laue, William Henry Bragg,
and his son William Laura its Bragg all earned Nobel
Prizes for their work using X rays to study crystals.

(01:06):
Those prizes were awarded in nineteen fourteen. In nineteen fifteen,
and William Henry Bragg's Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution
that introduced the idea of X ray crystallography to a
more general audience took place in nineteen twenty three. These were,
of course, not the only people working in the field.
The point was that this field was established in the

(01:29):
nineteen teens and twenties, and Dorothy Crowfoot graduated from Oxford
at nineteen thirty two. In such a new field, opportunities
for advanced education were kind of limited. This was especially
true since some of the universities where she might have
pursued graduate work were in Germany, where the Nazi Party

(01:50):
was rapidly gaining power. Even though she had traveled in
Germany the year before, going to these universities was obviously
not an option. Ultimately, Dorothy was accepted to join John
Desmond Burnow's lab at Cambridge. Burnell had worked with William
Henry Bragg, and the lab at Cambridge was far more

(02:11):
advanced and better equipped than what Dorothy had access to
at Oxford. In addition to that, Burnew and Dorothy had
some similarities in their worldviews. Although Dorothy didn't outwardly align
herself with any political party at this point, she was
a pacifist and her beliefs were largely socialist. Burnow was

(02:32):
also a peace advocate, and a socialist, and he joined
the Communist Party in nineteen twenty three. He also had
a lot of sort of utopian ideals, including advocating free love.
Although Dorothy isn't known to have had a romantic relationship
with anyone before getting to Cambridge, she similarly believed that

(02:52):
people's relationship should be unrestricted. Barnw was part of a
whole network of left wing scientists and was connected to
the Cambridge Scientists Anti War group, which was founded in
nineteen thirty two. He was also a passionate advocate for
social responsibility among scientists. Some of these beliefs and connections

(03:14):
did cause some challenges for him at Cambridge. Communism, of course,
can be very controversial, but this also speaks to his
reputation as a scientist, since it does not seem like
it actually affected his role at the university. When Dorothy
joined the lab, Bernald was using X ray crystallography to

(03:35):
try to study biological molecules. The molecules he was studying
don't typically form crystals in the body, but they can
be crystallized in a lab setting and then studied that way.
This had the potential to bring about new insights into
how these molecules worked in the body and how the
body functioned. Dorothy had not really intended to pursue a

(03:58):
PhD at Cambridge, but most of the people she worked
with thought that she should, so she did eventually start
working toward that end. Yeah, at first, she was mostly
thinking to get some additional education, but not go all
the way to a PhD with it. In nineteen thirty three,
Dorothy had a brief relationship with Conrad Hal Waddington, who

(04:20):
was known as wadd who was married but separated. This
relationship doesn't seem to have lasted very long, but wad
is often characterized as Dorothy's first love. She also had
a relationship with Bernal, who was married as well, and
who also had relationships with other women in addition to Dorothy.
In nineteen thirty four, Dorothy's family convinced her to see

(04:43):
a doctor about persistent pain in her hands, and she
went to London to do this. While she was gone,
Bernal photographed his first X ray of crystallized pepsin, which
is a digestive enzyme. Bernell had been working on this
for a while, and while Dorothy was a the way,
he had discovered that keeping the crystals wet allowed them

(05:04):
to produce a diffraction pattern. If the crystals were allowed
to dry out, which had been the standard procedure before this,
they just produced a smudgie, dark mess. Dorothy got back
to Cambridge with orders from the doctor to rest for
a month, not helpful advice really for her, but when
she saw what Bernald had accomplished, she immediately got to work.

(05:28):
Their results were published in the journal Nature as X
Ray Photographs of Crystalline Pepsin in May of nineteen thirty
four under both of their names. At the time, all
enzymes were believed to be proteins, and this moment is
marked as the beginning of protein crystallography. This was a
groundbreaking and exciting discovery. Other researchers had also been trying

(05:53):
to analyze proteins, only to wind up with vaguely black
diffraction patterns that didn't yield any inform. Bernad's realization that
a pattern emerged if the crystal was exposed while wet
in its mother liquid suggested other protein molecules could also
be studied if they were treated similarly. When Dorothy embarked

(06:15):
on her PhD research at Cambridge, she focused on steroles.
Steroid alcohols that are found in both plants and animals,
and include cholesterol, and are much larger and more complicated
than what she had studied at Oxford. Understandably, at this point,
Dorothy was talking about Cambridge as a place she never

(06:35):
wanted to leave. She was doing groundbreaking work in an
atmosphere that both challenged and encouraged what she was doing,
and she was among like minded people a lot of
the time. But not long after starting at Cambridge, she
was offered a research fellowship at Oxford. This would not
only take her away from the equipment and the colleagues

(06:57):
that she had at Cambridge, but it would also give
her teaching responsibilities, which would take time away from the research.
But at the same time, that fellowship was a paid
position and something that had the potential to turn into
a permanent role. We haven't really talked about it before
this point, but paying for her education had required help

(07:17):
from her extended family. It was not something that was
easy for them to afford, so the opportunity to earn
an income was not something that she could just pass
up without really considering it. In terms of her research,
this fellowship could also allow her to pursue whatever projects
she wanted seeing them through from beginning to end, which

(07:39):
was not the case while working in someone else's lab.
But her reluctance to leave Cambridge was also something she
did not try to hide from the governing body at Oxford. Eventually,
Oxford offered Dorothy a two year fellowship at Somerville College,
but one that would be more focused on research and
would have the first year taking place at Cambridge. She

(08:02):
returned to Oxford in September of nineteen thirty four. Before
leaving Cambridge, Dorothy supported anti war causes in anti militarization campaigns,
including signing a letter published in the Cambridge Review that
protested the militarization of scientific research. For the most part,
she supported the work of other activists who were doing

(08:24):
most of the on the ground, organizing and demonstrating. Her
main focus was the lab. Dorothy published her first paper
as the sole author on April thirteenth, nineteen thirty five,
when she was twenty four. It was titled X ray
Single Crystal Photographs of Insulin and it was published in

(08:45):
the journal Nature. This work involved figuring out how to
produce insulin crystals that were large enough to show a
structure when they were x rayed and photographed. This was
the beginning of her decade's long effort to figure out
the structure of insulin. Dorothy Crowfot was awarded a PhD
from Cambridge in nineteen thirty seven. Her dissertation was titled

(09:09):
X ray Crystallography and the Chemistry of the Sterolls. This
was also the start of her work on the structure
of cholesterol, which would continue into the nineteen forties. Also
in nineteen thirty seven, same year that she got her PhD,
she met Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, who was one of Marjorie
Fry's cousins. Dorothy was staying with Marjorie in London, where

(09:31):
she had been invited to use the crystallography equipment at
the Royal Institution. Thomas was also staying with Marjorie for
reasons that require us to get into his backstory. Thomas
Lionel Hodgkin was born in nineteen ten. He had attended
Balliol College, Oxford, at the same time that Dorothy had
been a student at Somerville College, although their paths never crossed.

(09:56):
Like Dorothy's father, Thomas had joined the British Civil Servant
where he worked in the British administrative territory known as
Mandatory Palestine. When he and Dorothy met, he had recently
resigned from his job after increasingly coming to support Arab
rights in Palestine and to oppose British imperialism. Thomas opposed

(10:18):
political Zionism and Britain's suppression of Arab uprisings against both
the British administration and the influx of Jewish immigrants from
Europe into Palestine. He had also become a communist. All
of this was straightforwardly incompatible with his work as a
British colonial administrator, and after he resigned, he was deported

(10:41):
to Lebanon. When Thomas and Dorothy met, he didn't have
a job and he was trying to figure out what
to do with himself. He was studying to become a
school teacher, which seemed like one of the only paths
that might be open to him at that point, but
it wasn't really what he wanted to do, and he
did not think he would be very good at it.
But he and Dorothy had a lot in common. They

(11:03):
were both very bright, with similar ideas on things like
human rights and pacifism. Thomas was a Quaker, and while
Dorothy never formally joined the religious Society of Friends. She
agreed with a lot of their beliefs. Thomas and Dorothy
got married on December sixteenth, nineteen thirty seven, after knowing
one another only a few months and meeting in person

(11:25):
only a few times. By the time they got married,
Thomas had found a teaching position. He felt a lot
more called to working in adult education in mining and
industrial communities in the north of England, so after they
got back from their honeymoon, they lived separately and they
saw each other only on weekends and holidays, but they
also wrote letters to each other almost every day. Dorothy

(11:49):
also continued to publish under the name Dorothy Crowfoot, not
adding Hodgkin until nineteen forty nine. Within a few months
of their marriage, Dorothy also became pregnant. This was completely
new territory for Somerville College and all the other Oxford
women's colleges. It wasn't even common for women fellows to
be married, and this was the first time anyone at

(12:12):
Oxford had given birth during a fellowship, so Dorothy became
the first person at Oxford to be given a paid
maternity leave. She felt a little weird about this, as
though she was being paid to do nothing, which kind
of cracks me up, given how much work a new
baby is. But the university seems to have realized that
if they did not set a precedent for offering maternity leave,

(12:36):
the women's scholars might feel like they could not accept
fellowships there because if they did, giving birth might derail
their career. The UK established its first paid maternity leave
law almost forty years later in nineteen seventy five, and
of course the United States established its first paid maternity

(12:56):
leave law. Never Do and Thomas's first child, a son
named Luke, was born in December of nineteen thirty eight.
The family had nurses and cooks to help look after
Luke and then later on his younger siblings as well.
That was while, of course Dorothy and Thomas worked in
different parts of England or different parts of the world.

(13:18):
This amount of help might sound like a luxury, but
it was necessary for both of them to be able
to work and the work that they wanted to do,
and money was always really tight for the family. Affording
this level of help was a struggle a lot at
the time. We are going to talk more about Dorothy's
career after we paused for a sponsor break. In the

(13:46):
months after Dorothy's son, Luke was born, she developed an
absess in her breast. This infection seems to have triggered
a flare up in the pain in her hands that
she had seen a doctor for back in nineteen thirty four.
As this was happening, in January of nineteen thirty nine,
Thomas fell asleep at the wheel and had a car crash.

(14:07):
He had narcolepsy, and that was something that was very
poorly understood at the time. He recovered, but he also
had to be hospitalized. Dorothy was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis,
which would affect her for the rest of her life.
She experienced pain and stiffness and swelling and deteriorating joints

(14:27):
that led her fingers to become misshapen, and this also
caused her to have difficulty with day to day tasks
like getting dressed. She also had to make some adjustments
in the lab to make her equipment accessible to her,
like adding long levers to switches so that she could
control the equipment. We're not going to repeat this over
and over for the rest of the episode, but this

(14:48):
was ongoing and at multiple points she had flare ups
in which her symptoms rapidly worsened. When Dorothy returned to
work after her maternity leave, her main focus was a
niche working on the structure of insulin. She gave birth
to a second child, Elizabeth, in nineteen forty one. By
that point, World War II was underway, and after her

(15:11):
daughter was born, the focus of Dorothy's work shifted to
the structure of penicillin. We have covered the history of
penicillin on the show before. Alexander Fleming discovered a mold
that had antibacterial properties by accident in nineteen twenty eight
and then published on it in nineteen twenty nine. Initial

(15:32):
efforts to turn this mold into a medicine were unsuccessful.
Then scientists at Oxford University, including pathology professor Howard Florey
and biochemist Ernst Chain, started working with Fleming's mold in
nineteen thirty nine. When Dorothy heard about the work with penicillin,
she described herself as quote irresistibly drawn to inject myself

(15:56):
into the situation. Not long after their first successful tests
in mice in nineteen forty, Chain challenged her to work
out the structure of the penicillin molecules, saying quote, someday
we will have crystals for you. The war made this
a high priority project, since figuring out the structure of
penicillin could allow researchers to synthesize it and to find

(16:19):
other similar molecules with antibiotic properties. It also gave Dorothy
access to equipment that she wouldn't have had otherwise. John
Desmond Bernal had moved from Cambridge to a lab at
Birkbeck University of London during the war. He was assigned
to work with the Research and Experimental Department of the

(16:39):
Ministry of Home Security, which a lot of people thought
was a little surprising considering his politics. His lab equipment
was moved to Oxford, both because it would not have
been used otherwise and because in London it was at
risk of being damaged in bombings. Two of his research
assistants at the university also went to work with Dorothy.

(17:01):
The first production of crystallized penicillin salt was in nineteen
forty three, but Dorothy didn't receive crystals that were really
suitable for this kind of study until nineteen forty four,
when samples were sent from the United States. Before that,
she and other chemists were able to break penicillin down
into smaller compounds and analyze those. Eventually, the core of

(17:26):
a penicillin molecule was known to contain twenty seven atoms,
including eleven hydrogen, nine carbon, four oxygen, two nitrogen, and
one sulfur, but these atoms could be arranged in very
different ways, and chemists disagreed on which configuration was more likely.
Dorothy's work on this required her and her team to

(17:49):
work in three dimensions rather than working as a flat projection.
They had to go layer by layer to create the
full structure of the molecule. She was finally caught that
the structure she had found was correct on May eighth,
nineteen forty five, which was victory in Europe Day. She
described carrying her physical model of the molecule through a

(18:11):
crowd of people celebrating the end of the war so
that she could show it to Ernst Shane. I think
it was made of like sticks and corks. Alexander Fleming,
Ernest Chaine, and Howard Florey were jointly awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work with penicillin
in nineteen forty five. That same year, a conference was

(18:32):
held to recognize the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of
X rays. Dorothy's work on the X ray crystallography of
penicillin seemed like a logical and important topic to cover
at this conference, but it was decided that only work
that was carried out before nineteen forty four would be
publicly announced. Dorothy's colleague Kathleen Lonsdale, who was also a crystallographer,

(18:57):
wrote a letter to John Brunall that described Dorothy as
quote as angry as her gentle nature will allow her
to be over this decision. It wasn't just that her
accomplishment wasn't going to be included at this conference. She
also thought keeping it a secret would hinder scientific progress,
and there was no reason for the secrecy now that

(19:20):
the war was over. The pharmaceutical companies that were producing
penicillin also wanted her work to be protected as a
trade secret, so her crystallographic work on penicillin was not
published until nineteen forty nine, overlapping with Dorothy's wartime penicillin work.
In nineteen forty three, Margaret Roberts entered the chemistry program

(19:42):
at Somerville College, Oxford. She would later become Margaret Thatcher,
Prime Minister of the UK from nineteen seventy nine to
nineteen ninety, and Dorothy was one of her teachers. These
two women were extremely different politically, but Thatcher had a
pick make sure of Dorothy at the Prime Minister's residence
at Downing Street, and Dorothy also spoke directly to Margaret

(20:06):
Thatcher on a number of topics that were important to
her during her time as Prime Minister, including improving relations
with the Soviet Union and chemical weapons test bans. To
return to the nineteen forties, In nineteen forty five, Thomas
was appointed Secretary to the University's Delegacy for Extra Mural
Studies at Oxford. That was an adult education program, so

(20:29):
for a while the family was all together and living
near Oxford, but Thomas eventually left this position to travel
to Africa and help set up adult education programs in
what's now Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan, and also to work
with anti colonial and independence movements in these places. While
in Africa, he also started writing books about African history

(20:53):
and African nationalism. Thomas and Dorothy's third child, Toby, was
born in nineteen forty six. Dorothy became a Fellow of
the Royal Society the following year, which was two years
after Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjorie Stevenson became the first two
women to become Fellows of the Royal Society. In nineteen

(21:14):
forty eight, Dorothy was part of the establishment of the
International Union of Crystallography, and one of the things that
she was really insistent about was that it needed to
be a truly international organization. That meant that, regardless of
the growing Cold War, this organization needed to include crystallographers
from the Soviet Union and nations allied with the Soviets,

(21:37):
including scientists who were Communist Party members. This was another
theme in her life and her career. Science was science
regardless of where a scientist lived, and scientists should be
allowed to communicate and collaborate with one another, regardless of
the political differences among them or among their home nations.

(21:57):
Also in nineteen forty eight Leicester's Myth, the pharmaceutical company
Glaxo sent Dorothy samples of what was being called anti
pernicious anemia factor to analyze. We have talked in other
episodes about how research into vitamins has often focused on
the conditions. Those substances prevented, like vitamin C, which prevents scurvy,

(22:20):
being called anti scorbutic factor. Anti pernicious anemia factor is
now known as vitamin B twelve. Today, pernicious anemia is
understood as an autoimmune disorder that keeps the body from
absorbing vitamin B twelve correctly. By this point, people had
started developing computers that can help with the laborious calculations

(22:44):
involved in X ray crystallography. There were some computers in
the UK, including the pilot Ace computer that was originally
developed by Alan Turing, which Dorothy used to process some
of her data, but she also got an offer to
have some of her calculations done in the United States
at a computer at the National Bureau of Standards. Taking

(23:06):
advantage of this offer required sending data across the Atlantic
Ocean through the mail or by telegraph. Dorothy worked on
the structure of vitamin B twelve for years. She also
traveled a lot, including to the United States to meet
with researchers there and to Africa to visit her husband.

(23:26):
In nineteen fifty three, she planned to visit the US
to meet with Linus Pauling about protein research, but that
year the State Department ruled her statutorily inadmissible to the
United States. This probably involved an assortment of factors, including
her connections to known communists, including her husband and John Bernal,

(23:48):
and her participation in organizations like Science for Peace. A
number of people advocated for her to be allowed into
the US, and she got a waiver in nineteen fifty seven,
but for decades after this, any time she wanted to
go to the United States, first she had to go
to the US Embassy in London and have her waiver renewed,

(24:09):
since she had been barred from entering the United States.
In nineteen fifty three, she decided to go on a
different trip, which was to go to Russia with John Bernal.
We said earlier that Dorothy could be overly optimistic or naive,
and this definitely seems to be true when it came
to her perceptions of the Soviet Union and her experiences there.

(24:31):
She was by far not the only person to find
the Soviet Union's professed ideals of equality and egalitarianism appealing.
That has come up in a number of previous episodes
of the show. But she also heard about atrocities that
had been or were being carried out under Joseph Stalin,
such as the famine known as the Holla Demor that

(24:52):
we covered on the show in twenty twenty two. She
also heard about things like scientists and academics being abducted disappearing,
but she seemed to have trouble believing a lot of this.
She also heard about it a lot of it from
sources in the United States and US allies. The United
States had barred her from entry. She was reluctant to

(25:16):
believe news from a country that would not permit her
to enter, and, as was the case for other visitors
to the Soviet Union, her visit in nineteen fifty three
was very tightly controlled, so there were limits to what
she actually saw. Dorothy published her work on the structure
of vitamin B twelve in nineteen fifty five after eight
years of work, with additional work happening after that. This

(25:40):
was a larger, more complex molecule than penicillin, with one
hundred and eighty one atoms. That year, she was promoted
to reader at Oxford, which is roughly comparable to a
professor in the United States. She also advocated for pay
equity for the women in her lab She always maintained
that she had faced barriers based on her gender, but

(26:02):
when she heard that women were being paid differently depending
on whether they were married, she refused to let that stand.
This was one of many efforts to advocate for women's
students and researchers during her career. We'll get to the
later part of her career. After a sponsor break in

(26:29):
nineteen fifty seven, Dorothy Crowfitt Hodgkin and her children moved
in with her sister, Joan, who had gotten a divorce
and also had children of her own. They formed a
household of three adults and eight children. Although Thomas was
still frequently away, Joan was in charge of managing the household,
which became home to just a continual stream of guests.

(26:51):
There were scientists, African independence activists, poets, writers, all of
the teenaged friends of all of these children. It sounds
like a very busy, bustling place. People probably thought it
was a commune. At some point. Dorothy continued to both
research and travel. She was willing to go anywhere there

(27:14):
were crystallographers she could encourage or learn from. That included
being part of a delegation of British academics who visited
China in nineteen fifty nine. In nineteen sixty Dorothy was
named to the Royal Society Wolfson Professorship, which was an
endowed professorship that brought more funding and more academic status

(27:34):
than she'd had previously. The following year, her husband Thomas
was appointed Director of the Institute for African Studies in Accra, Ghana,
by President Kwame and Kruma. Dorothy saw Thomas for a
month or two at a time between then and nineteen
sixty six, when Kruma was overthrown in a coup. Fortunately,

(27:57):
Thomas was not in Ghana when that happened, his life,
if definitely, would have been at risk. In nineteen sixty four,
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for her determinations by X ray techniques of the structures
of important biochemical substances. This made her the third woman
to earn a chemistry Nobel, after Marie Kirie and Irene

(28:20):
Giulio Ciri, and the only British woman ever to earn
a Nobel Prize in science. Thomas was still working in
Ghana then and she was there visiting him. She learned
about the award from two reporters from the Ghana Times,
who came to interview her about it. Her telegram informing
her of the award, and many many telegrams and letters

(28:41):
congratulating her, had all gone to her home in England,
where they were forwarded to her through the mail by
a niece who had been raised to be frugal. I
love this story so much. No one thought to say,
if I win the Nobel Prize, send a telegram immediately.

(29:04):
Her Nobel Awards ceremony took place on December tenth, nineteen
sixty four. Dorothy and Thomas traveled to Sweden from Ghana.
Their daughter Elizabeth came from Zambia, where she was working
as a teacher. Their son Toby came from India. Their
other son, Luke and his family were in Algeria, where
Luke was teaching at a university, and they were unable

(29:25):
to attend. They had become a very global family. Dorothy
was awarded the Order of Merit in nineteen sixty five,
making her the second woman so awarded after Florence Nightingale.
Combined with her Nobel Prize, this made her a public figure.
She used some of her Nobel Prize money to support
the students and staff who had worked with her at Oxford,

(29:49):
and she used the public recognition she developed to advocate
against war and imperialism and for nuclear disarmament. These ideas
had always been important to her, but before this her
research had always taken priority. It really seemed like as
she became a lot more famous, she really felt a
duty to use that fame to advance social and political causes.

(30:13):
At the same time, she was usually really non confrontational
in her advocacy. She had always believed that constructive dialogue
was the key to resolving disputes, Going back to attending
the League of Nations General Assembly when she was a teenager,
she tried to advocate for scientists whose work was being
suppressed by talking directly but respectfully to government leaders and

(30:36):
other officials in those countries. She was willing to go
anywhere and work with anyone who was trying to break
new ground in science, regardless of that country's relationship with
the UK. This increasing dedication to advocacy and the travel
schedule brought on by her Nobel Prize meant she was
spending less time in the lab when she was there.

(30:59):
Her prime Mary focus was back on figuring out the
structure of insulin. Insulin is a very large, complex molecule,
containing seven hundred and eighty eight atoms, and the math
just was not something she could do by hand when
she first photographed in insulin crystal in nineteen thirty five.
In the nineteen sixties, developments in computers made this math

(31:21):
more possible. Her team of researchers from around the world
solved the structure of insulin in nineteen sixty nine, thirty
four years after she took that first picture. Dorothy always
made it clear that she did not do this by herself,
and she also regularly credited J. D. Bernal with the

(31:41):
discoveries that had made her later work with protein crystallography possible.
But many of the researchers who worked on the structure
of insulin with her said that she was really the
key to this whole effort. She tied everyone's work together,
She made critical insights and asked really probing questions that
kept the work going. In nineteen seventy, Dorothy was named

(32:05):
chancellor of the University of Bristol, a position she held
until nineteen eighty eight. This was generally considered to be
an honorary position, but she used it to advocate for
funding for the university, and she met directly with students
to hear about their concerns and to try to resolve them.
In nineteen eighty two, government funding cuts threatened to close

(32:27):
the university's Department of Architecture, and while Dorothy was outvoted
in trying to save it, she became part of the
establishment of the Bristol Center of Advanced Architecture to help
take its place. Over the nineteen seventies and eighties, she
continued to do a lot of travel, A lot of
it was focused on her peace activism. She also made

(32:48):
a point of traveling to visit, work with, and advocate
for scientists in developing countries and countries that were considered
to be enemies or at least unfriendly to the UK.
That included multiple trips to the Soviet Union, anti Communists, China,
and North Vietnam. She was deeply and vocally opposed to

(33:09):
the United States involvement in the Vietnam War and served
as president of the Medical Aid Committee for Vietnam and
a member of a Commission of Inquiry into US war
crimes in Vietnam. Dorothy was often accompanied by a family
member when she traveled, often her daughter or one of
her older grandchildren. Because of the assistance that she needed

(33:31):
day to day and the many ways that the world
could be inaccessible to her, rheumatoid arthritis was progressively disabling
for her, and eventually she started using a wheelchair. In
nineteen seventy two, Dorothy became president of the International Union
of Crystallography. One of her projects as president was to
negotiate for China's readmission into the Union. This didn't actually

(33:55):
work out. During her time in office, China would not
be part of any organization that recognized Taiwan as an
independent country, which the Union did. China was readmitted to
the Union in nineteen seventy eight after the death of
Mao Zadong. From nineteen seventy five to nineteen eighty eight,
Dorothy also served as president of the Pugwash Conferences on

(34:17):
Science and World Affairs. This organization was established after World
War II, inspired by a manifesto sent from Bertrand Russell
to Albert Einstein. Einstein signed this manifesto shortly before his death,
and others also signed it, but it has become known
as the Russell Einstein Manifesto. The manifesto called for scientists

(34:40):
to quote assemble in conference to appraise the perils that
have arisen as a result of the development of weapons
of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution. Those perils,
of course, included the threat of nuclear war. In nineteen
seventy six, Dorothy was awarded the Royal Societies Coply Medal,

(35:00):
which is its highest honor. She was the first woman
to be so awarded. She retired from the Wolfson Professorship
the following year, having spent a lot of her last
years in that role just setting everything up to continue
on without her. Thomas Hodgkin died in Greece in March
of nineteen eighty two while he and Dorothy were on

(35:21):
the way home from a trip to Sudan. In addition
to having narcolepsy, Thomas was a lifelong smoker, and he
had developed severe emphysema. His cause of death was heart failure.
Dorothy had him buried in the churchyard of the village
in Greece where they had been staying. Their marriage had
been one of lengthy separations for almost its whole existence.

(35:45):
Thomas had also had relationships with other people, which Dorothy
knew about. I wrote the word affairs in this outline,
but I kind of think it's the wrong word. It
doesn't feel like either of them thought these relationships were
a breach of trust. One of those relationships, though, was serious,
and it was with somebody that he had been engaged
to before he ever met Dorothy. She was really devastated

(36:09):
after his death. Though she lost weight, the symptoms of
her rheumatoid arthritis got worse. Her colleague, Guide Dodson, worried
that she might be seriously ill, and he tried to
ask her if something was wrong, and her answer was no, guy,
it's just grief. Dorothy tried to keep herself busy with
a lot of travel and conferences. In nineteen eighty seven,

(36:31):
the Soviet Union awarded her the Lenin Peace Prize. In
nineteen eighty eight, she published her last paper on insulin
at the age of seventy eight. After that, she retired
from public life, primarily because of the pain and progressive
disability involved with having rey with tooid arthritis. In nineteen ninety,
Dorothy fell at home and broke a hip, and after

(36:53):
that she needed twenty four hour assistance. After the fall
of the Soviet Union restricted were lifted on her entry
into the United States. She still did travel when she could,
including to the nineteen ninety International Union of Crystallography Conference
in Bordeaux, France. In nineteen ninety three, apparently inspired by

(37:14):
a TV program that was critical of China, she decided
she wanted to attend the International Congress of Crystallography held
in Beijing. Everyone was really worried about this trip, and
her doctor refused to certify her as fit for travel,
but she went anyway in the company of her daughter Elizabeth.
In nineteen ninety four, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin fell and broke

(37:38):
a hip again. She went to the hospital, and her
family ultimately decided to bring her home. She died there
a couple of weeks later, on July twenty ninth, nineteen
ninety four, at the age of eighty four. Molecular biologist
and crystallographer Max Perutz, who had been Dorothy's friend and
colleague for about forty years, delivered a eulogy. I'm going

(38:01):
to read part of it as I try not to
fall apart quote. She pursued her crystallographic studies not for
the sake of honors, but because this was what she'd
liked to do. There was a magic about her person.
She had no enemies, not even among those whose scientific
theories she demonstrated or whose political views she opposed. Just

(38:22):
as her X ray cameras bared the intrinsic beauty beneath
the rough surface of things, so the warmth and gentleness
of her approach to people uncovered in everyone, even the
most hardened scientific crook, some hidden kernel of goodness. She
was once asked in a BBC radio interview whether she
felt handicapped in her career by being a woman. As

(38:45):
a matter of fact, she replied ingenuously, men were always
particularly nice and helpful to me because I was a woman.
At scientific meetings, she would seem lost in a dream
until she suddenly came out with some penetrating remark you,
usually made in a diffident tone of voice, and followed
by a little laugh, as if wanting to excuse herself

(39:07):
for having put everyone else to shame. As a side note,
Max Perutz and John C. Kendrew were awarded a Nobel
Prize for discovering the structure of hemoglobin in nineteen sixty two,
two years before Dorothy got her Nobel Prize. Perretz said
of that quote, I felt embarrassed when I was awarded

(39:27):
the Nobel Prize before Dorothy, whose great discoveries had been
made with such fantastic skill and chemical insight and had
preceded my own. In addition to her groundbreaking work on
the structure of things like penicillin, insulin, and vitamin B twelve,
over her career, Dorothy Crowft Hodgkin had encouraged and mentored

(39:49):
students from around the world. Former students established crystallography labs
in multiple countries, including China, India, and New Zealand. One
of her former students, M. Vijayan wrote an obituary in
which he described her as a mother with a vast
international family of colleagues and scientists and friends, noting that

(40:12):
of the more than one hundred scientists who worked in
her laboratories, only twenty five came from the UK. Others
came from a number of places, some of the countries
I'm about to say don't exist anymore. This is his
list from when he wrote her obituary. Australia, India, Canada,
New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Chile, Denmark, New Guinea, Germany, Holland, Yugoslavia, China, Japan, Poland, France,

(40:40):
Nigeria and the USSR. Today, the Royal Society offers a
Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship for early career scientists who need some
flexibility in their work, like parents, caregivers, people with health
conditions or disabilities, anything requiring flexibility. That's Dorothy Hodgkin. I
love her so much. She's great. That's why she got

(41:01):
a two part episode. Uh. I also have a little
bit of listener mail, and this listener mail is from
Julia who wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, my nine year
old has been getting really into learning about history and
as a result, we listen to the podcast every time
we're in the car together. This week, we're visiting Savannah, Georgia,
going on plenty of historic home tours, et cetera. And

(41:23):
what episode should come up on our queue but the
Life and After Life of Casimir Pulaski. It prompted us
to add a visit to the Fort Pulaski National Monument
just outside Savannah, which is a really cool interpretive site
and gave us the chance to talk about the history
of the fort from colonial times to the present, touching
on many topics covered in previous podcast episodes we've listened to.

(41:46):
The fort is also a gorgeous place to stroll around
with tunnels, motes, beautiful views of wetlands in the coast,
and rolling grass hills. Thanks so much for creating accessible, engaging,
rigorous history content for my kiddo to devour and which
gave us jumping off points to talk about current events
and history. IRL. This podcast is solid gold. In lieu

(42:06):
of Pat tax, I'm including this picture of my kiddo
holding a small hermit crab from one of the touch
tanks and the nearby Tybee Island Marine Center a great
little aquarium slash nature center just down the road from
Fort Pulaski, Julia. And indeed we have a photo of
a child's small hand holding a hermit crab. Very sweet.

(42:30):
My brother had a pet hermit crab when we were
small children who was acquired at the beach. Julia, Thank
you again for this email. I love it. If you
would like to send us a note where a history
podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also read the
show notes to our episodes on our website, which is
besinistory dot com, and you can subscribe to the show

(42:51):
on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Crystalline Chemistry, Part 2