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Dorothy Hodgkin

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work, ideas and life of the woman who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work and ideas of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for revealing the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin and who later determined the structure of insulin. She was one of the pioneers of X-ray crystallography and described by a colleague as 'a crystallographers' crystallographer'. She remains the only British woman to have won a Nobel in science, yet rejected the idea that she was a role model for other women, or that her career was held back because she was a woman. She was also the first woman since Florence Nightingale to receive the Order of Merit, and was given the Lenin Peace Prize in recognition of her efforts to bring together scientists from the East and West in pursuit of nuclear disarmament.

With

Georgina Ferry
Science writer and biographer of Dorothy Hodgkin

Judith Howard
Professor of Chemistry at Durham University

and

Patricia Fara
Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

52 minutes

Last on

Thu 3 Oct 2019 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

READING LIST:

Guy Dodson, Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, O.M. 12 May 1910--29 July 1994 (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 48, 2002)

Patricia Fara, A Lab of One鈥檚 Own: Science and Suffrage in World War I (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Patricia Fara, Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science (Icon Books, 2007)

Patricia Fara, Pandora鈥檚 Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico, 2004)

Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (first published 1998; revised edition Bloomsbury, 2019)

Dorothy Hodgkin, The Collected Works of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (Indian Academy of Science, 1994)

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries (first published 1993; Henry Joseph Press, 2001)

Broadcasts

  • Thu 3 Oct 2019 09:00
  • Thu 3 Oct 2019 21:30

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