Uploaded November 2020 | Updated September 2026, 23 minutes ago
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910 – 1994) remains the only female British scientist to have won a Nobel prize (Chemistry 1964). She won it for using the cutting-edge technique of X-ray crystallography to visualise the internal structure of the medically-important biological molecules penicillin and Vitamin B12. She carried out this work not in a modern chemistry laboratory, but in a small basement room in the University Museum (as it then was), originally as part of its Department of Mineralogy. In this talk I will investigate the subterranean origins of a technique that now commands massive resources (including the Diamond Light Source near Didcot), and show how Hodgkin single-handedly launched Oxford as a centre for the study of the living body’s molecular components.
Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster. She has been a staff editor and feature writer on New Scientist, and a presenter of science programmes on BBC Radio. A revised edition of her 1998 biography of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: Patterns, Proteins and Peace. She is a regular contributor to publications including The Guardian, Nature and The Lancet, and was Writer in Residence at OUMNH during its 150th anniversary year in 2010.
Visit our website: oumnh.ox.ac.uk
Your generous donations help to keep our public programmes running. Donate to the Museum: oxgive.info/3gObNNl
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910 – 1994) remains the only female British scientist to have won a Nobel prize (Chemistry 1964). She won it for using the cutting-edge technique of X-ray crystallography to visualise the internal structure of the medically-important biological molecules penicillin and Vitamin B12. She carried out this work not in a modern chemistry laboratory, but in a small basement room in the University Museum (as it then was), originally as part of its Department of Mineralogy. In this talk I will investigate the subterranean origins of a technique that now commands massive resources (including the Diamond Light Source near Didcot), and show how Hodgkin single-handedly launched Oxford as a centre for the study of the living body’s molecular components.
Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster. She has been a staff editor and feature writer on New Scientist, and a presenter of science programmes on BBC Radio. A revised edition of her 1998 biography of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: Patterns, Proteins and Peace. She is a regular contributor to publications including The Guardian, Nature and The Lancet, and was Writer in Residence at OUMNH during its 150th anniversary year in 2010.
Visit our website: oumnh.ox.ac.uk
Your generous donations help to keep our public programmes running. Donate to the Museum: oxgive.info/3gObNNl
