Together, Bernal and Hodgkin photographed with X-rays the single crystals of the protein pepsin, launching protein crystallography in 1934. Protein had never before been photographed in this way.
In the middle of the experimentation, when she was twentyfour years old, Hodgkin was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease causing joint pain. It would last her whole life. She was advised to take a break, but she refused. The secrets of pepsin were within sight! Besides, summer was around the corner—she would rest when everyone else did. Hodgkin recognized an exciting project when she saw one, and it was smart that she didn’t take a break in the middle of the pepsin project. X-ray crystallography offered a leap in scientific experimentation, and proteins such as pepsin offered a marvelous puzzle that put crystallography to the test.
This three-dimensional map shows penicillin’s electron density and position of individual atoms.
Proteins are large, complicated biological molecules. When they’re hard at work, protein strands fold over on themselves into tangles. To understand how that can make scientific research complicated, consider this: Is it easier to photograph an entire piece of rope if it’s stretched out or if it’s tied in a knot? If you want to see what a person looks like, would you ask for a photo of that person standing straight or curled up? Scientists don’t learn all they need to if they take the “easy” photo, of the protein when it’s a strand. They have to photograph the foldedover protein in order to see how it works, because it’s only working when it’s folded over.
Though Hodgkin eventually used early computers, most of her computing and mapping of atoms was done by hand.
The fact that Bernal and Hodgkin were able to take a photograph of pepsin that clearly showed its complicated structure is impressive on its own merits. But this was not purely an academic pursuit; Bernal and Hodgkin didn’t do this just to see if they could. There were practical applications. They learned that protein molecules are unique from all other types of molecules. Unlocking the secrets of pepsin opened the door to understanding insulin, hemoglobin, and viruses, which later would lead to major advancements in health and medicine. Hodgkin and Bernal’s experiment with pepsin also helped them advance X-ray crystallography’s process. Until their work, crystals were taken out of their mother liquor, the solution left over after crystallization, before they were studied. Bernal found the pepsin crystals, left in the air, were too shriveled to photograph. Keeping them in liquid, a new tactic, made this success possible.
CHANGING THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE LAB
Bettering the community was always as important to Hodgkin as making discoveries in the lab. She desired peace and freedom of education around the world, even in countries that her home country of England considered enemies, such as the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam. She so wanted the research of scientists in other countries to succeed that she supported them in deed as well as in word. Chinese researchers were studying the insulin structure at the same time Hodgkin was, and she visited them more than once to compare notes.
Hodgkin’s mother was her first example that one should work for good. Molly Crowfoot took her fifteen-year-old daughter to the Sixth Assembly of the League of Nations, which focused on international disagreements being sorted out through debate, not wars. Another strong influence on Hodgkin, especially in adulthood, was one of the first people she met at college. Margery Fry, principal of Somerville College, was also a social activist who was influential in prison reform and victim compensation. Later, Hodgkin would become close friends and colleagues with Bernal, who, besides being her academic advisor, was very politically active. And the man Hodgkin would live most of her adult life with, her husband, shared many beliefs with her.
Fry introduced the two while they both were staying at her house in London. Thomas Hodgkin had been working for the British government in Palestine. During the Arab revolt of 1936–1939, he visited Jewish and Arab prisoners alike and was so affected by what he saw that he resigned. Eventually, he found himself back in England. When his future wife met him, he was applying to teach grammar school. As she reflected later, thankfully for everyone involved, since he was not good with discipline, he took a job in young adult education. Specifically, he worked within his passion for service work—he taught unemployed minors.
Hodgkin started her life with an excellent foundation of support from her extensive network of family and friends. From them she learned to be both curious about the world and compassionate with her work. She was never a wallflower in this regard, but she really came into her own in college, when she was a young adult ready to put what she was learning into practice.
Dorothy Hodgkin, age seventy-nine
CHAPTER
TWO
A LAB OF HER OWN
After two years at Cambridge, Hodgkin returned to Oxford in 1934 with a fellowship from Somerville. She was well invested in chemistry, crystallography, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray crystallography, and was committed to exploring what each could do. As a study of atomic and molecular structures, crystallography works well with many different sciences, but Hodgkin used it from a chemist’s perspective. When an X-ray hits a crystal, it diffracts—or shoots off in different directions, bouncing off the atoms in the crystal—and the result of this is X-ray crystallography.
As Hodgkin continued to work, she continued living her dreams, proving the stuff of her imagination with math and experimentation. Crystallography may not seem like a science that’s easy to visualize because what the researchers study is too small to see or touch, but there actually are a lot of moments you can picture.
HODGKIN ’S NEW HOME
When we think of laboratories today, we may envision sterile rooms in blocky buildings built only for function. Hodgkin’s was in the Oxford Museum, a Victorian neo-Gothic beauty full of meaning. Influenced by art critic John Ruskin, who liked the idea of nature influencing architecture, it was perfect for housing a lab that studied the very essence of naturally occurring substances. For example, wrought-iron pieces twisted in archways to look like sycamore, walnut, and palm tree branches. Each column in the courtyard was made of a different rock found in Britain. Statues of scientists such as astronomer Galileo and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin may have appeared to look on as Hodgkin and her students worked.
Her lab was tucked into a corner of this building. On a sunny day, a little light must have filtered through the one ornate window with its pointed arch. Using a ladder—there were no stairs—Hodgkin and her students accessed the gallery where the X-ray machine sat. Hodgkin also worked as a chemistry tutor at Somerville, so her students were seniors at Somerville and people from a variety of Oxford colleges completing their PhDs. They were following tradition big and small: in that very building seventy-five years before, scientist T. H. Huxley defended Darwin’s revolutionary Origin of the Species against Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s claims that evolution was not real. In 1905, Polly Porter, an inspiration to Hodgkin, started working in the Oxford Museum with Henry Alexander Miers, who created Oxford’s crystallography department.
Now, flash forward to 1936, a little over a year after Hodgkin’s return to Oxford. This is when she took her first X-ray of insulin. This was a huge accomplishment. Insulin is incredibly important to every person’s health. Without enough of it behaving as it should in the system, blood sugar levels rise to dangerous levels. This leads a person to develop diabetes, a disease that has serious effects on overall health. Proteins in general set the bar high for complicated molecules, and insulin is one of the trickiest proteins to understand. It would take Hodgkin and her team more than three decades to fully solve insulin’s structure. However, photographing it was a big first step.
With her impressive work, Hodgkin had earned her doctorate, and she graduated from Cambridge, with Bernal as her advisor, in 1937. She wrote her thesis on the sterols research they did; Bernal’s starting work with sterols had been the exciting work that had drawn her to transfer temporarily to Cambridge. That same ye
ar, she married Thomas Hodgkin, an expert in African and Middle East history and politics. As Dorothy Hodgkin followed in her family’s footsteps, going into a research career, so her husband followed in the footsteps of his family of historians.
TRAILBLAZING THROUGH SOCIETY AS WELL AS SCIENCE
As a scientist who was also a wife and mother starting in the late 1930s, Hodgkin worked outside a very particular social norm for women. In 1930, according to the US Census, 24.3 percent of women worked outside the home; in 1940, 25.4 percent did. Most of these held clerical, factory, or domestic servant jobs. Some were teachers or nurses. Most worked for wages much less than men’s pay. It was particularly difficult for married women to work. Fortune magazine polled its readers in 1936, asking, “Do you believe that married women should have a full-time job outside the home?” Only 15 percent of respondents offered unconditional approval. While 37 percent were okay with married women working in some cases, 48 percent disapproved wholeheartedly, in large part because they believed women should be home with their children.
Hodgkin and her husband had children soon after they married: Luke was born in 1938, Elizabeth in 1941, and Toby in 1946. In contrast to the norm reported by the US Census and polls such as Fortune’s, everyone who was important in Hodgkin’s life supported her being a working mother. Her husband wanted her to continue to work, and she even sometimes worked under her maiden name. Her father and mother, having also been working parents, helped care for the kids. For a time, her family shared a home with her sister Joan and Joan’s husband and five children, a situation that widened the network of support for these working parents and kids alike. And Hodgkin’s employer, Somerville, offered paid maternity leave, a rarity in those days (and still not guaranteed by all employers today).
Hodgkin proved their belief in her correct, managing to be both a brilliant scientist and a loving mother. In his obituary for her, her friend and colleague Nobel Prize–winning chemist Max Perutz wrote that she could be motherly even while working; she was a multitasker, listening intently to her children and then solving equations with equal attention to detail.
A NEIGHBOR IN THE WORLD COMMUNITY
To the benefit of some people, Hodgkin went above and beyond in blending her roles as scientist and mother. In addition to her three biological children, she “adopted” many others, younger scientists with whom she worked in her laboratory. They were from twenty-one countries, including the United States, Australia, India, Canada, New Zealand, China, Denmark, Holland, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, though most were not from her home country of England. Everyone knew her as nurturing and guiding, willing to open her lab as quickly as she was to open her home. When Hodgkin was involved with a group, the group became like a family. She encouraged this communal feeling even in more public, formal ways. For instance, she sponsored the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which promoted friendship between British and Chinese people.
Hodgkin had lots of interests outside of her work, including her family. Here she is with her oldest child, Luke.
That she would conduct her life like this was not surprising. Hodgkin was raised to consider the world her neighborhood. With her parents traveling around Africa and the Middle East, she called nowhere and everywhere her home. She instilled the same message in her kids; all three studied and worked in various countries once they became adults.
As a member of the world community, Hodgkin didn’t see the world as her playground—she saw it as a place where she lived and worked on a day-to-day basis, where her neighbors lived, and where she could do some good. That was certainly an attitude her mother had instilled in her. Tragedy helped to give her mother this perspective. All four of Hodgkin’s uncles died in World War I, either directly in battle or as a result of their war injuries. Molly Crowfoot not only desperately missed her brothers but hated what she saw as the wastefulness of their deaths. They’d ended up dying so young, and the world seemed to be no better than it had been before the war—maybe it was even worse. As she mused on this, she thought she heard the voice of one of her brothers. He told her that making the world a better place was actually her job, and what their deaths had done was allow her to realize that.
At so many times in Hodgkin’s life, she intersected with other luminaries making big changes in both their fields of work and world politics and affairs. She would become one of the most famous subjects of photographer Helen Muspratt, sitting for a portrait with Muspratt and her business partner, Lettice Ramsey, around 1937. One can only imagine that the three women connected over many aspects of their lives. Muspratt was, like Hodgkin and like Ramsey—who went to work after her husband died—also a major financial contributor to her household. Hodgkin had no problem collaborating with Communists, who were often vilified at that time, and Muspratt was a Communist, having become one after crossing into “enemy territory” to take pictures in the Soviet Union. Also like Hodgkin, Muspratt became involved in the peace movement, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Medical Aid for Vietnam.
After Hodgkin became chancellor of Bristol University in 1970, the Hodgkin Scholarship was established. It provided funding to students from developing countries. The Hodgkin House was built to house students visiting from overseas. (Both were named for Hodgkin’s husband.)
As the president of the International Union of Crystallography, also in the 1970s, she allowed crystallographers from behind the Iron Curtain to participate in conferences. These were countries ruled by or with tight ties to the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, and considered enemies of Hodgkin’s country and its allies. Her opinions about this did not sit well with the United States; there were restrictions on her US visa until 1990.
She gave the Azad Memorial Lecture, on “Wondering Scientists,” in 1973 in India. The lecture series promotes understanding across nations. In 1987, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for her commitment to peace. J. D. Bernal, her mentor and friend in matters both outside and inside the lab, had won the award in 1953.
PEACE AND JUSTICE WORK
Bernal himself did much for peace and justice, including helping to establish the J. D. Bernal Library, which opened in London in 1968 as a center for researching peaceful solutions to world issues. Hodgkin sponsored the library and was elected chair of the library board in 1971.
During the Vietnam War, Hodgkin’s concern for peace leaped. She became vice president of the Medical Aid Committee for Vietnam in 1965 and president of it in 1971. Dr. Joan McMichael started the organization in 1965 after she visited Vietnam and realized how desperate the people were for medical attention. She asked Hodgkin to be the organization’s first president, but Hodgkin declined because at that time she was busy helping elsewhere in the world: she was in Ghana frequently because her husband was setting up an African studies institute there. During Hodgkin’s presidency of the Medical Aid Committee for Vietnam, the committee collected 6,567 pints of blood during a blood drive. Also as president, she visited North Vietnam in 1971 and 1974. This organization is still around today, now called Medical and Scientific Aid for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
At about the same time, Hodgkin was one of the deputy chairmen of the International Commission of Enquiry into US Crimes in Indochina. It was established during the Fifth Stockholm Conference on Vietnam in 1970 to address violent crimes by the United States against Indochinese peoples. Hodgkin was honorary vice president for a project called the British Hospital for Vietnam, which sought to raise funds to build a hospital in North Vietnam.
In 1986, Hodgkin joined the Institute for International Peace Studies’ International Advisory Board because, like the institute, she encouraged multidisciplinary research and teaching in issues of peace and justice. Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA) requested she chair the opening session of its first conference to coordinate scientists halting nuclear arms use. For the International Scientists’ Peace Congress, Ways Out of the Arms Race, in Hamburg in 1986, Hodgkin was a member of the advisory comm
ittee.
Though Hodgkin was not interested in flaunting her awards and honors, she was not opposed to making use of them. She was happy to claim her status as a Nobel Prize winner in order to speak on topics important to her. She gave a lecture at Science and Peace: The Nobel Laureates Answer in Paris in 1983.
THE MIRACLE MEDICINE
Ten years after Hodgkin started her investigation of insulin, she made a discovery that some might say would prove even more influential: she calculated penicillin’s structure. She was thirty-five years old, and she held in her hands the answer to a large variety of health concerns. Yes, the answer was literally in her hands: she made a physical model of wires and corks, demonstrating the arrangement of atoms in penicillin. Often, scientists show their work with numbers, mathematical calculations incomprehensible to many people. However, sometimes, they break a discovery down.
Knowing the structure of penicillin was a game changer. Today, it’s hard to imagine a world where penicillin is not commonplace. Because of penicillin, illnesses like strep throat and ear infections are now considered minor and easily treatable. But not that long ago, before Hodgkin’s work, the smallest of infections could lead to fatal complications.
The History of Penicillin
The discovery of penicillin in 1928 was a serious feat that happened in a comical way. Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was working on antiseptics for infections. His lab was a mess, Petri dishes stacked like so many dirty dishes in a sink. As he went to finally clean, he noticed that mold had started to grow on some of the dishes—and all around the mold, the staph bacteria that had been growing in the dishes had died. Fleming was witnessing penicillin in action.
Dorothy Hodgkin Page 2
