HODGKIN (Hodgkin), Dorothy K.

genus. May 12, 1910
English chemist Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, born in Cairo, Egypt, which at that time was ruled by England. Her father, John Winter Crowfoot, was a famous specialist of classical philology and the British archaeologist Egyptian educational services. He often helped his wife, Mary Gray (nee Hood), a talented amateur botanist, who later described the flora of the Sudan, and became an international authority on Coptic textiles.
. Dorothy, the eldest of four daughters, was 4 years old, when the First World War
. Fearing a possible attack by the Turkish army, the parents sent the children to England, to his grandmother on the father in g. Worthing, located a few miles from Brighton, on the shore of the Channel. After the cessation of hostilities in 1918. Mother X. returned to England and settled with the children in Ms.. Lincoln, where home-taught their history, science and literature. Over the next three years his mother X. runs between Britain and the Middle East until it settles at r. Geldstone, East Suffolk, where Crowfoot ancestors lived for centuries.
Before 1928. H. attended school, John Lehman, located near Beckles. At school, she was fond of the crystals.
and this prompted her to more in-depth study of the history of crystallography and chemistry, the subject matter is usually studied in those days, only boys. At the age of 13 while visiting his father in Khartoum, where he served as director of education and studying ancient Sudan, she met п?.пє. Joseph, a chemist, soil scientist, who helped her to carry out a quantitative analysis of some of the local minerals.
In 1926, Mr.. her father became director of the British School of Archeology in Jerusalem, and after graduating from high school X. visits to his parents to Palestine. Excavation of the Byzantine churches in Jerash (Transjordan, now Jordan), she was fascinated by archeology, but despite this, returning to England, began to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford.
X. read about X-ray diffraction in crystals in his book 'On the Nature of Things' ( 'Concerning the Nature of Things'), written U.G. Bragg for pupils. Bragg and his son, U.L. Bragg, with Max von Laue were the developers of a new science - the X-ray crystallography. Laue discovered that X-rays passing through the crystal can difraktsionirovat with the formation of the characteristic spots on the photographic plates. Bragg then demonstrated that these data reflect the internal structure of each crystal. With the addition of complex mathematical calculations X-ray analysis has become an important method of determining the size, shape and position of atoms and molecules in the crystal.
In interest on new processes, X. studied crystallography under the direction of X. M. Powell in Somerville. Then she spent the summer in Heidelberg at the laboratory of Victor Goldschmidt, another pioneer of crystallography.
After graduating from Somerville College in 1932. H. received a small research grant, which, together with additional financial support from her aunt allowed her to work at Cambridge University with an outstanding physicist Dzh.D. Bernal. Bernal studied X-ray diffraction analysis of crystals sterols (solid cyclic alcohols, such as cholesterol, found in biological tissues), which was the subject of special interest. Two years later, she returned to Somerville in the department of Mineralogy and Crystallography, and remained there for almost his entire career.
. Having obtained using organic chemist Robert Robinson, a grant for the purchase of X-ray apparatus, X
. continued analysis of sterols, especially cholesterol iodide. For his thesis on the subject, she in 1937, Mr.. receives doctorate. This work, according to U.G. Bragg - an example of the use of physical method, which expands the boundaries of organic chemistry in determining the complex spatial structures.
Three years after the Second World War X. began research penicillin - an antibiotic discovered in 1928. Alexander Fleming and refined later by Ernst B. Cheney, with whom she met at Cambridge, and Howard U. Flory. In wartime, the drug appeared in the most urgent need for treatment of infectious diseases caused by bacteria. But because the chemical structure of penicillin was almost unknown, there could be no question of its synthesizing and mass production.
With a small group of aides in Oxford, X. launched a study of penicillin by X-ray analysis. Passing X rays through crystals of penicillin at different angles, the group identified the resulting diffraction of samples, registered on photographic plates, and calculate the location of key atoms in the crystal lattice. Later, the use of IBM-PC programs on punch cards made it possible to simplify the task of getting the laboratory of electron density maps, on which X. and her colleagues in 1949. determined the molecular structure of penicillin.
Even before the end of the work with penicillin, X. in 1948. applied X-ray analysis for the study of vitamin B12, which helps prevent anemia, a potentially fatal condition of blood. At this time, become available electronic computers are used for calculations. H. finally identified the molecular structure of vitamin B12 in 1957, a year after her appointment to the post of lecturer at the rate of X-ray crystallography at Oxford University. In 1958, Mr.. her laboratory moved from scattered in different locations of rooms in the University Museum of Natural History - in a modern building, built with all the requirements of chemical science.
. 'For determination using X-ray structures of biologically active substances' x
. received in 1964. Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When presenting a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Gunnar Hegge said: 'Knowledge of the structure of compounds is absolutely necessary in order, . to interpret its properties and reactions and decide, . how can synthesize it from simpler compounds ..,
. Determining the structure of penicillin ... was truly an amazing start of a new era of Crystallography '. And further: 'Determining the structure of vitamin B12 was seen as a triumph rantgenostrukturnogo analysis of crystals in terms of chemical and biological significance of results in huge complexity of the structure'.
Pioneering the development of X. methods rentgenosktrukturnogo analysis of crystals have been used by Max Perutz and John K. Kendrew in studies of protein structure, as well as Rosalind Franklin, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, James D. Watson and Francis Crick in the analysis of the helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Despite the growing arthritis, X. continued study of the hormone insulin, and in 1972. after forty years of work completed analysis of Zn-insulin. Work on the structure of this complex molecule, which contains nearly 800 atoms (vitamin B12 consists of 90 atoms), has been further complicated by the fact that insulin is crystallized with the formation of several forms.
Between 1960 and 1977. H. held the post of professor-researcher Royal Society of London. In 1977. She was elected a Fellow of Wolf-son College, Oxford. It is also an honorary rector (since 1970) at Bristol University, and since 1975. - President of the Pugwash movement.
In 1937, Mr.. She married Thomas Hodgkin, the son of the Oxford historian and grandson of two other historians, a descendant of Thomas Hodgkin (cancer of the lymphatic system is called by its name - Hodgkin's disease) and cousin physiologists Alan Hodgkin. School teacher in the first years after the wedding, Thomas Hodgkin, for many years served as director of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana. In Hodgkin's two sons and daughter live in Ilmingtone (Warwickshire, England). H. remains an active member of the laboratory, saying: 'There are a lot of complex crystals, which challenge us'.
Award-winning, X. has an honorary degree at Cambridge, Harvard and Brownian universities and universities of Leeds, Manchester, Sussex, Ghana, Chicago and many other. She was the second Englishwoman, awarded the Order of Merit (1965); also awarded the Royal Medal (1957), the Copley Medal (1976) Royal Society of London and the Gold Medal. University (1982) Academy of Sciences. It is a foreign member of Academy of Sciences of the United States, Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Ghana, Puerto Rico and Australia. It provided funding for the International Union of crystallographic and was its president from 1972 to 1975