Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994) was a British chemist renowned for her groundbreaking work in X-ray crystallography, which enabled her to determine the three-dimensional structures of important biomolecules. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Hodgkin’s early interest in chemistry led her to study at Oxford University, where she excelled in crystallography under the guidance of J.D. Bernal.

Hodgkin’s most notable achievements include determining the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin, among others. These discoveries revolutionized our understanding of the chemical and biological properties of these molecules, laying the groundwork for advancements in medicine and biochemistry. In 1964, Hodgkin became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on the structure of important biochemical substances using X-ray crystallography. Throughout her career, she remained dedicated to scientific research and education, inspiring generations of scientists with her innovative contributions to structural biology.

Dorothy Hodgkin Quotes

1. “The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

2. “I should not like to leave an impression that all structural problems can be settled by X-ray analysis or that all crystal structures are easy to solve. I seem to have spent much more of my life not solving structures than solving them.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

3. “I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, Concerning the Nature of Things.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

4. “I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There’s the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that’s the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you’ve got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

5. “Still I had a lurking question. Would it not be better if one could really ‘see’ whether molecules as complicated as the sterols, or strychnine were just as experiment suggested?”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

6. “I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

7. “A great advantage of X-ray analysis as a method of chemical structure analysis is its power to show some totally unexpected and surprising structure with, at the same time, complete certainty.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

8. “I used to say the evening that I developed the first x-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

9. “I must confess that, at that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the slowness of the relaxation processes in the ground state, processes which take place in collisions with the wall or with the molecules of a foreign gas.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

10. “The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. If you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you’ll find molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. Probe the smaller particles, you’ll find something else, a tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

11. “The magnitude of the atomic weight determines the character of the element, just as the magnitude of the molecule determines the character of a compound body.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

12. “Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

13. “Music is geometry in time.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

14. “In geometric and physical applications, it always turns out that a quantity is characterized not only by its tensor order, but also by symmetry.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

15. “The right amount of complexity is what creates the optimal simplicity”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

16. “The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

17. “Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin

18. “It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself – the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin