Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot

Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot 

Born May 12, 1910, in Cairo. British chemist and biochemist. Fellow of the London Royal Society (1947).

Hodgkin studied at Oxford University (1928-32), where she began to specialize in X-ray structural analysis. In 1932 she began working at Cambridge University. In collaboration with J. Bernal, she investigated the structure of sterols, peptides, and amino acids. She carried out an X-ray structural analysis of penicillin (1946), as well as of vitamin B₁₂ (1956), which clearly revealed the vitamin’s structure. Hodgkin was the first to establish (1961) the direct link between a metal (cobalt) and carbon in organometallic compounds (one of the Bn-coenzymes). A member of many academies of sciences throughout the world, she is a Nobel Prize winner (1964).

WORKS

”Rentgenostrukturnyi analiz i stroenie belkov.” In the collection Aminokisloty i belki. Moscow, 1952. (Translated from English.)