Many people will have been prescribed antibiotics to cure
a nasty infection or even to save their lives. Behind the development of modern
medicines like these is Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin who remains the only British
woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. She won the 1964 chemistry prize
outright for her techniques to find the atomic structure of biochemicals. Among
her discoveries were the molecular structures of Penicillin (1945), Vitamin B12
(1955) and Insulin (1969). Knowing biochemical structure allows chemists to
understand how drugs work. Microscopes cannot magnify to atomic level so the
technique that she used was X-Ray Crystallography.
If you shine a laser through a fine lattice onto a screen,
instead of a blurred shadow, a sharp diffraction pattern can be formed. It is
possible to find out the shape of the lattice by using advanced mathematics
along with the diffraction pattern measurements and the laser frequency. More
energetic X-Ray's beamed through solids can create a diffraction pattern in a
similar way. By focussing X-Rays through a crystal's lattice of atoms to get a
diffraction pattern the molecular structure can be calculated. This was
virtually impossible for the molecules that build living organisms but Dorothy
Hodgkin was able to grow, mount the crystals and reveal their 3D atomic
structure. With the relatively primitive equipment of the time, finding each
structure took many years of science and engineering effort.
She was a mother with three children and worked as a
scientist well into her eighties. Besides her Nobel Prize, Awards and
Fellowships in 1965 she received the Order of Merit, given personally by the
Queen and limited to only 24 living British Commonwealth citizens. Transforming
the lives of the sick Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the first woman to be
conferred this honour since Florence Nightingale.
- John Faulkner
No comments:
Post a Comment