Hodgkin likely kept in touch with Thatcher to talk with her about political concerns, although, according to Hodgkin’s granddaughter, Katharine Hodgkin, “Dorothy did not have a very high opinion of Thatcher; as a chemist she thought her average; as a politician she deeply disapproved of her.” This seems to be backed up by Hodgkin voting against Oxford University giving an honorary doctorate to Thatcher in 1985. Hodgkin felt the prime minister had hurt education with her policies.
JUDITH HOWARD
Judith Howard did not come from a family accomplished in formal education—her father ended his schooling when he was thirteen years old—but she did come from one that placed a great deal of importance on learning. Howard remembered that her father would call her well into his old age to talk about something he’d read in the newspaper.
Margaret Thatcher didn’t go on to have a career in science after studying under Hodgkin, but she is arguably Hodgkin’s most famous student.
Durham University played a key role in Judith Howard’s career.
Though she read the books that filled her childhood home, she at first focused on dance. Eventually, she outgrew that, literally—one of the leading dance schools said her legs were all wrong—and ended up finding great success in the sciences. In the late 1980s, Judith Howard was invited to apply to lead structural chemistry at Durham University, in the United Kingdom. There she established an internationally renowned lab, was elected a Royal Society fellow, and became the founding director of Durham’s Biophysical Sciences Institute. Her work with a Nobel Prize winner, Hodgkin, who was Howard’s PhD supervisor, had clearly paid off.
With all her leadership roles, she spends most of her time and energy attending meetings, signing off on paperwork, preparing for assessments, and figuring budgets. Don’t call her a nonpracticing scientist, however: “Mind you, I’ll make sure I do find some lab time; otherwise I’ll go mad.”
PAULINE HARRISON
Another of Hodgkin’s tutees at Oxford, Pauline Harrison, followed her tutor’s fascination with proteins and focused her career on the large iron storage protein ferritin. She successfully determined its structure while giving priority to a research style she considered important: interdisciplinary. She regularly collaborated with clinicians and physicians, as well as with other chemists.
Both of Pauline Harrison’s parents were botanists, and her mother had been a trailblazer in her own family by being the only female to attend college. Still, Harrison’s father was not comfortable with her interest in chemistry. Fortunately, her mother’s support won out.
Harrison has chaired not only the British Biophysical Society, which she cofounded, but also the Sheffield University Fine Arts Society. She focused on her appreciation of painting after retiring from being a professor and researcher, proving that people who practice curiosity in their professions, as scientists do, never stop doing so.
ELEANOR DODSON
Did Eleanor Dodson consider retiring from math after Hodgkin recruited her in the 1960s? How could Dodson reach any higher a success than having a Nobel Prize–winning pioneer recognize her skills and say she needed Dodson in order to do her research well? Of course Dodson could rise even higher—she could become a pioneer in her own field.
She developed analytical tools that make crystallographic techniques accessible to more people, even those outside the field. Because of this work, the Royal Society named her as a fellow in 2003. She cofounded a computing cooperative in 1974 and was one of the main reasons the number of crystallographers studying at York University swelled; everyone wanted to work with her after she joined the faculty in 1976.
Like so many of her female colleagues in math and science, Dodson was mathematician, wife, and mother, all at the same time. She was fortunate in that so many of her employers, from Hodgkin to York University, allowed her work flexibility. For most of her career, she worked on part-time and short-term formal and informal contracts.
ADA YONATH
In the more than one hundred years that the Nobel Committee has been awarding prizes in chemistry, there have been four winners who were female. Of those, two were crystallographers. Dorothy Hodgkin, of course, is one. Ada Yonath, given the award forty-five years after Hodgkin, is the other.
Having educated parents with stable and well-paying jobs can help children become educated for two reasons: if the parents see the value of education, they may wish that for their children, and if the family is financially settled, the children don’t have to work or are healthy enough to focus on school. But this is hardly necessary for a child to get a good education.
Ada Yonath was the second female X-ray crystallographer to receive the Nobel Prize, in 2009.
Yonath was raised in poverty. Her parents were not formally educated, and her father was chronically ill. But they put Yonath through a top school, and Yonath fostered her own natural curiosity and intelligence. With humor, Yonath told the Nobel Prize committee that at five years old, she tried to measure the height of her family’s covered apartment balcony. She stacked tables and chairs on each other, but she could not manage to reach the ceiling. She did manage to fall from the wobbly pile and break her arm. She noted the experiment would never be completed; new tenants, after her family moved out, remodeled.
Yonath earned degrees and did postdoctoral work in chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics at prestigious universities in her native Israel as well as in the United States. In 1970, she founded the first— and the only, for ten more years—biological crystallography lab in Israel. Her successes in trying to determine the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome, which is the part of cells that builds protein, will have major practical implications. It could aid in the development of more efficient antibacterial drugs and help in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Decades after five-year-old Yonath’s first experiment, Yonath’s granddaughter invited her to talk about the ribosome—at her kindergarten. The influence is clear.
RACHEL KLEVIT
A researcher at the University of Washington, Rachel Klevit is the 2016 winner of the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award. This is the tenth time the award has been given in recognition of impressive contributions to protein science. Her work has focused on understanding breast cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Like Hodgkin, she believes knowing how molecules work together is key to understanding life, which is key to understanding disease, which is key to understanding how to improve and prolong life. She runs her own lab at the university, and she and her students and associates focus on using high-resolution NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, which is an alternative to X-ray crystallography. There are pros and cons to all, depending on the substance and research goals. Klevit also places importance on mentoring younger scientists.
THE SCIENTISTS STUDYING MARS
X-ray diffraction is used everywhere, even outside this world. When trying to figure out if there had ever been life on the planet Mars, scientists used X-ray diffraction on the rocks found on Mars.
Despite what cartoons and movies tell us, scientists were not expecting to find little green people living on Mars. They were hoping to find life forms that are much smaller and, to a degree, much stronger than any human could be. They were wondering if they might find microbes, bacterial life forms. The soil and grit and rocks of Mars’s surface are where those microbes would have been.
Archaeologists—like so many members of Hodgkin’s family have been, including Hodgkin herself—dig in the ground for objects left behind by people who lived a long time ago. Studying those objects tells us about the people who made, used, and discarded those objects. What did they need to live? What resources did they have available to them? Scientists studying Mars are doing the same thing regarding microbes. But what microbes leave behind is too small to dig up with a trowel and clean with a brush, as archaeologists do items left by humans. So scientists turn to technology, to powerful X-rays.
They collect a nice sample from Mars’s surface. In this pile will be
a wide variety of types and sizes of dirt and rock. The scientists shoot a concentrated X-ray beam at the dirt. The light diffracts, or shoots out in different directions, just as it did for Hodgkin and her colleagues, who aimed X-ray beams at protein crystals. And just as Hodgkin captured a photograph from this, of dots, the Mars scientists capture a photograph of their work. Their images show up as rings, called Debye Rings, and not as individual dots, but the scientists proceed as Hodgkin did. They use Bragg’s law to calculate how big the spaces are between layers of atoms. Now they know what type of minerals they’re looking at.
In 2012, scientists used X-ray diffraction to analyze the soil on Mars, for the first time identifying without doubt that planet’s soil makeup. They found that sample to be similar to volcanic soil in Hawaii.
One of the most thrilling discoveries scientists have made is that there is riverbed clay on Mars. X-ray diffraction told them that they were looking at the type of clay that can only form under certain conditions— not too acidic, not too salty. In other words, this clay formed near water that would have been perfectly drinkable by humans. There may have been life, as we understand it, on Mars.
THE SCIENTISTS USING DIAMOND LIGHT SOURCE
Diamond is a nonprofit organization impressive in both size and scope of mission, which is to study basically everything, as Hodgkin and her peers in crystallography did. The people who run it are not shy about expressing the debt fit owes Hodgkin. The scientific research organization celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, 2015, by focusing on Hodgkin. It tweeted a link to an article describing how her work led directly to Diamond’s current experiments. Without Hodgkin, Diamond very well might not have existed.
Diamond is based in London. It is funded by the government of the United Kingdom, via the Science and Technology Council, and the Wellcome Trust, a charity that supports research into the health of humans and other animals. The facility is free to scientists who work in schools and in corporations and who pass a rigorous application process. They also must promise to put the results of their research in the public domain. That is, they won’t own it—anyone can study it and make use of it.
Diamond Light Source, on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, is the United Kingdom’s national synchrotron science facility and a leading research site in the world.
THE NEXT GENERATION OF HODGKIN: JENNY PICKWORTH GLUSKER
The number of similarities between Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin and her student Jenny Pickworth Glusker is fascinating. Both are British, and both grew up with parents who encouraged their daughters’ studies. As Hodgkin’s interest in chemistry started with a book, so did Glusker’s. From one of her mother’s medical books, she learned how mixing pills could cause a bad reaction in patients. She then got a chemistry set. With it she made “wonderfully colored solutions and evil-smelling products.”
Hodgkin interviewed Glusker for admission to Somerville and then became her tutor. They met one-on-one every week. Though Hodgkin did not like the term “role model,” Glusker saw her as one. She was a successful chemist, and she had a husband and kids. Glusker had decided she would not leave her own career if she ever had children.
Eventually, Glusker and her chemist husband looked for jobs in the United States. (Like Hodgkin, Glusker met her husband while in school.) It was an uphill battle, in large part because Glusker was a woman. You might think if a woman had a doctorate in chemistry, how could she be denied a great job? Easy: companies often house their own libraries, and they’d hire women as librarians. If they had children, it didn’t matter how many degrees they had. Finally, two chemical companies in Philadelphia accepted Glusker and her husband. Glusker wrote to Hodgkin for a letter of recommendation. Hodgkin’s reply was that Glusker’s talents belonged somewhere with a greater purpose. She suggested Glusker apply at the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) in Philadelphia.
Glusker worked at ICR her whole career. She studied chemical carcinogens and antitumor agents. By learning their structures, she and her colleagues could understand how they react with the body. Like Hodgkin, Glusker educated others and led professional organizations; while Hodgkin was president of the International Union of Crystallography, Glusker was president of the American Crystallographic Association.
Diamond Light Source is the technology everyone who visits Diamond wants to use. It’s the United Kingdom’s synchrotron, a powerful source of X-rays that are ten billion times brighter than the sun. It works like a giant microscope, allowing us to learn about everything from fossils to viruses. It’s sort of the next generation of the X-ray tube that Hodgkin used, as did all her colleagues, from the discovery of X-rays in the late 1800s until about 1960. While it took Hodgkin more than thirty years to figure out insulin’s atomic structure, it would take a scientist using Diamond Light Source one hour.
The reason for the leap in time is that technology has advanced a great deal. Scientists today are able to use ever-tinier crystals because they have access to more intense X-rays that produce higher-resolution images than scientists had back in Hodgkin’s day. Computers crunch data much more quickly and accurately than they did during that time, too. Diamond also mentions the breakthrough scientists made when they started freezing protein crystals, which reduces the amount of damage an X-ray can do to a crystal. Helen Megaw, Hodgkin’s contemporary, was freezing crystals a long time ago—like Diamond scientists, Hodgkin herself benefitted from the technique of freezing crystals, but she did so directly because of another female scientist’s smarts!
In 1980, the first synchrotron radiation source (SRS) was built. Five years later, X-ray diffraction allowed scientists to solve the structures of two human viruses: polio and the common cold. In 1997, John Walker was the first person to win a Nobel Prize (in chemistry) for work driven by synchrotron rays. More such awards, for other scientists working on different problems, quickly followed: Nobel Prizes were awarded in 2003 and in 2006 for work done with synchrotrons. Then in 2009, DNA came back into the story. Its discovery happened because of X-ray diffraction. Sixty years later, another advancement in the understanding of DNA happened because advancements in technology allowed for synchrotron radiation. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada Yonath studied ribosome’s structure and function using this tool.
JACK DUNITZ
Jack Dunitz was one of Hodgkin’s postdoctoral researchers, meaning he helped her in her lab after he earned his PhD. Together, they worked on some of the most complex structures ever to be investigated with X-ray crystallography. He was with Hodgkin when she saw the notyet-published DNA structure. In addition to Oxford, he worked at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the NIH Institute of Mental Health, the Royal Institution in London, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Dunitz studied in Glasgow, Scotland, where he had been born. As so many students and researchers were, he was affected by war. World War II made him pack his undergraduate work into three years. Another hallmark of many successful researchers: Dunitz was a selfstarter; with his doctoral supervisor busy with administrative duties, Dunitz had to find his own learning opportunities. That’s how he found X-ray crystallography.
He would say the reverse actually happened, that crystallography chose him, as going into the sciences at all did: “It just happened, as in a dream. In a dream, you don’t do things, things happen to you.” As Hodgkin had, Dunitz had a casualness about him. He was appointed to high positions and won awards for his work in crystallography, but he was always just a regular person. He swore that at Caltech he was better known for the cabaret shows he put on with a biologist colleague than for his scientific contributions.
HODGKIN’S FAMILY: THE NEXT GENERATIONS
Just as it was important to mention the family Dorothy Hodgkin grew up with as people who influenced her, it’s important to mention some of the family members who came after her. Even if they didn’t follow exactly in her professional footsteps, they surely were influenced by her. Her intelligence, c
asual humility, curiosity, determination, and good humor provided a setting in which they could be and do what they wanted to be and do.
All three of her children went on to academic or research careers. Among other things, Luke has been a professor of mathematics at King’s College London. Elizabeth has been a human rights researcher for Amnesty International, earning a PhD in history, and has edited a collection of her father’s letters. Toby has worked in agrobiodiversity research for the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, an organization that facilitates countries peacefully debating questions and issues of agriculture production that otherwise could lead to political arguments. In the next generation of Hodgkin’s family, there are, among others, a historian, an astronomer, and an anthropologist.
“I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT IS VERY MUCH LIKE THE PRESENT, ONLY LONGER”
It’s possible that Dorothy’s legacy will be both very much what she herself experienced in her work and very much what she might have expected the work to turn into. Crystallography may very well continue as it has been going, just stronger, faster, with more and more advanced technology. Of course, as Nils Bohr, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics, said, it’s difficult to predict the future. Dorothy said something like that, too. Crystallography allows for exploration, experimentation, surprises under the surface just waiting to be discovered. As advancements in the field occur, the field will actually start to look quite a bit different than it used to. Consider how different Hodgkin’s work looked from Emil Fischer’s. Are both still crystallography? Yes and no. Will the crystallography of tomorrow seem more “no” than “yes” if advancements start taking away previous definitions of crystallography—for example, what if improved lasers remove the need for substances to be purified into crystals?
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