Dorothy Crowfoot Research Papers

Dorothy Crowfoot (later called Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin) was born on May 12, 1910 in Cairo, Egypt to John Winter Crowfoot and Grace Mary Hood Crowfoot. John was a school inspector that worked for the Egyptian Education Service and later became the Director of Education and Director of Antiquities in Sudan. He retired in 1926 and focused on archaeology and later became the Director of Jerusalem’s British School of Archaeology. Grace Mary was botanist and illustrated the different flora found in Sudan, she was very much involved in John’s work. Both believed in selflessness and service traits they thought their daughter as they were growing up.
Dorothy was interested in chemistry at a young age and started studying it at age 10. Dr. A.F. Joseph, a good friend of her parents, let her study and analyze some chemicals on a trip to Sudan. She was allowed to join the
She discovered how x-rays crystallography can be used to determine the structure of proteins. She assisted Bernal as he applied the technique to pepsin, the first time this method was used in analyzing a biological substance.
In, 1932 Dorothy began her career in Cambridge working in the lab of John Desmond Bernal. John Bernal was a true pioneer in the early days of X-ray crystallography, and was consistently pushing the boundaries of the possible ways of using that method. She started her on lad in 1935 at Somerville College, Oxford. Within a year she produced her first x-ray photograph of insulin. Then Dorothy used her PhD to move onto more complex work and research that lead her to solve the structure of cholesterol.
She married Thomas Hodgkins, a historian, in 1937. They had three children, their eldest son Luke became a mathematician. Their daughter Elizabeth became a historian, just like her father and the youngest son Toby studied botany and