Profile – £50 Note Zone

Lived:

12th May 1910 - 29th July 1994
Occupation:

Chemist
Known for:

Only British woman to have received a Nobel Prize for science - won for developing protein crystallography; a technique used to find the structures of proteins
Field:

Chemistry, X-ray crystallography

One sentence about me: I discovered the structures of Vitamin B12 and insulin, while pioneering a technique used by scientists ever since
About Me:

Although my greatest achievement might be winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and being one of a small group of people who kickstarted the technique of X-ray crystallography as a way to discover the structure of proteins and DNA, I hope to also be remembered for the way I lived my life.

Despite marrying Thomas Hodgkin in 1937, it was only in 1949 (after we’d had 3 children) that I started actually using his surname rather than my maiden name Crowfoot when I published my work. Amazingly, I was the first woman at the University of Oxford to receive paid maternity leave and after winning the Nobel, I used some of the prize money to establish a nursery at Somerville College at the University of Oxford.

Apparently Margaret Thatcher was inspired by me as a woman with children who surpassed the men at the top of my field, but we did not share our politics. I was banned from the USA in the 1950s due to my socialist connections, supported the miners strikes, spoke out against apartheid, and accepted the Lenin Peace Prize in 1987.
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Dorothy Hodgkin