Dorothy Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) is renowned for her discovery of the molecular structure of penicillin and of Vitamin B12, which made her the third woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
She is also credited for the development of protein crystallography and most recognized for the advancement of the technique of X-ray crystallography, a very fundamental tool now used to determine the structures of many biological molecules necessary to understand its full potential.
Later on, she deciphered the structure of insulin after 35 years of working in the field of chemistry when she came back to Oxford to continue the research she had begun when she was still an undergraduate.
Aside from the Nobel Prize, she also won the Lenin Peace Prize, and she is the first woman to obtain the Copley Medal and the second woman to receive the Order of Merit in 1965, with Florence Nightingale as her predecessor.
Born on May 12, 1910 to parents devoted to education and archaeology, Hodgkin saw herself doing chemistry and crystals at about age 10, despite her obvious penchant for excavations where she was tagged along by her parents.
Hodgkin was born in Cairo, Egypt, and for four years, lived there with her parents and sisters. When World War I began, she and her sisters went back to England in Norfolk to be cared by relatives and friends while her parents stayed in Egypt.
Her interest in science in general was largely influenced by her mother, but her inclination particularly in chemistry was further nurtured by a family friend named Dr. A.F. Joseph, who gave her chemicals and helped her analyze a mineral called ilmenite during her stay in Sudan.
In 1921, she attended the Sir John Leman Grammar School in Beccles, where she, together with another girl named Norah Pusey, was given the privilege to join the boys in chemistry classes. She then took chemistry at Somerville College in University of Oxford, which was an exclusive school for women, in 1928 at age 18.
From Oxford, she went to University of Cambridge for her doctorate degree. Here, under the supervision of John Desmond Bernal, she became fully aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography in finding out the structure of proteins, working with him on the technique's first application to analysis of a biological substance, pepsin.
Though already married in 1937 to Thomas Hodgkin, who came from a lineage of historians, Hodgkin the scientist used her maiden name in publishing her research papers until 1949, when she was forced to use her married name.
Hodgkin succumbed to cardiac stroke on July 29, 1994 at her Warwickshire residence.
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