Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin — File:Dorothy Hodgkin Nobel.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · See the source file page for the applicable license

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

1910–1994 · United Kingdom · 20th century

Nobel Chemistry 1964

Used X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin.

Nobel Prize work

Hodgkin used X-ray diffraction on single crystals to solve the three-dimensional structures of complex biomolecules, most famously penicillin (1945) and vitamin BX12\ce{B12} (1956) — then the most intricate molecule ever determined. Achieved with hand calculations and early computers, these analyses made crystallography the decisive tool of structural biochemistry. She later completed the structure of insulin, pursued since 1934.

Fields

Analytical chemistryBiochemistry and biomedical chemistry

Related topics

Cryo-EM, protein crystallography

Structural biologists infer molecular architecture from scattered electrons or X-ray diffraction, with distinct sample preparation and data-processing limits.

Chemists in the same field

Archer J. P. Martin (1910)Melvin Calvin (1911)William H. Stein (1911)Alexander Todd (1907)Stanford Moore (1913)Luis F. Leloir (1906)