Science: The Chemistry-Minded Mother

If Nobelman Charles Townes came close to being a linguist, Nobelwoman Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, 54, of Oxford, third woman ever to win the chemistry award,* came even closer to being an archaeologist. Born in Cairo while her father was Director of Education for the Sudan, she spent her early school holidays in digs in the Near East. But soon after she entered Oxford’s Somerville College in 1928, she got caught up in the exciting mysteries of chemistry. By her second year, she was already concentrating on the intricacies of X-ray analysis of large, complicated molecules—the work that won her a Nobel award.

Dorothy Hodgkin’s singular achievement was born of a peculiar amalgam of scholarship and domesticity. Her family is scattered now; her husband, whom she married in 1937, is director of the Institute of African Studies in Ghana, where she is now visiting. Her three children are spread among Algeria, Zambia and India. But her old Victorian house in north Oxford still buzzes with her sister’s collection of five kids.

Mrs. Hodgkin’s orderly mind seems to thrive on a diet of clutter and clatter. After graduation from Oxford, when she went into research, her first lab was in a dingy basement under the university museum. It was her precarious exercise to climb a ladder to a gallery while carrying the delicate crystals with which she worked. But whatever the circumstances, she maintained an elegance of appearance and achievement. No distraction was enough to spoil the work that led to a thorough knowledge of the penicillin molecule, and to the discovery of the structure of Vitamin B12, the recalcitrant molecule with a cobalt atom heart that is essential to human life.

* The other two: Marie Curie, 1911, and her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, 1935.