00:00:30 Nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was born in Egypt on May 12, 1910, to John Crowfoot,

00:00:57 an archaeologist, and Grace Mary Hood, a recognized authority on ancient textiles.

00:01:03 Professor Hodgkin's interest in chemistry started very early, when as a child she carried

00:01:09 out chemical analyses on a stone found during an excavation in the late 1920s.

00:01:17 She attended Sir John Lehman School in Suffolk and later Somerville College in Oxford.

00:01:24 In 1936, she received her Ph.D. from Cambridge after working on X-ray analysis of large molecules

00:01:32 with J. Desmond Barnell.

00:01:35 She married Thomas Hodgkin in 1937 and held a number of academic positions, including

00:01:42 research fellow at Somerville College, university lecturer, and later reader, in 1955.

00:01:50 She continued her pioneering work on the analysis of the chemical structure of penicillin during

00:01:55 World War II, and later became a Wolfson Professor of the Royal Society in 1960, one of only

00:02:03 373 women scientists recognized by the 14,000-member organization.

00:02:11 In 1964, Professor Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on X-ray

00:02:18 crystallographic analysis of the structure of vitamin B12 molecules, only the third woman

00:02:24 to be awarded the coveted prize.

00:02:28 In addition to her scientific endeavors, Professor Hodgkin has been a tireless worker for the

00:02:33 cause of international peace, and with her three children, continues to support important

00:02:39 causes globally.

00:02:42 Professor Hodgkin, you were born in Cairo in Egypt.

00:02:45 Can you tell me a little bit about your family background?

00:02:48 Yes, my father actually came from East Anglia in our country, and it's thought that very

00:03:02 likely his family, Crowfoot, started there as a result of one of the Viking invasions

00:03:13 from Denmark.

00:03:15 He had met my mother in Lincolnshire.

00:03:20 Her family were country squires.

00:03:24 She grew up as a squire's eldest daughter, hunting and going to balls and going to a

00:03:33 finishing school in Paris where she worked very hard at music and French, but she was

00:03:41 a person of very wide interests.

00:03:45 Did you children find this at all strange, or did you just think it was the way things

00:03:50 were?

00:03:51 No, we just took it as the way things were.

00:03:54 Once we had the house, we sort of kept it going.

00:03:58 We would go out and play in it on Saturdays when we were living in Beckles with a friend.

00:04:13 You had a very good school in Beckles, didn't you?

00:04:15 Yes, well it was a good ordinary government school.

00:04:22 It was the school of the neighborhood that was designed to train children for the different

00:04:31 kinds of jobs that were about, and particularly for teaching in primary schools.

00:04:37 There were special children who had scholarships from all the villages around who were pledged

00:04:44 to be teachers.

00:04:51 I first came across chemistry just before I went to that school in a small governess

00:04:57 class that was organized in Beckles, which we went to while our parents were looking

00:05:06 for a house and the rest of it.

00:05:10 The course was one organized by the PNEU organization, Parents National Education Union, and one

00:05:23 started with little books, one about each science, and this first one was chemistry,

00:05:30 a book a term.

00:05:32 I was lucky I had chemistry, and in the first lesson, almost as far as I remember it, growing

00:05:39 crystals of copper sulfate and alum, which set me on the course of what I wanted to do

00:05:48 for the rest of my life.

00:05:51 I was a little disappointed actually when I went to the lemon school to find they didn't

00:05:55 do chemistry in the first term, but a little physics, which was much duller, being about

00:06:02 levers and things like this.

00:06:06 But then, owing to some government cut, our physicist was cut, and there was chemistry

00:06:14 for the rest of the time there with Miss Dealey, who was a very good teacher, to take us through

00:06:25 so that I never really looked back from it.

00:06:28 There was one episode which encouraged me still further.

00:06:35 When I was thirteen, my father was rather near retiring age from the Sudan, which was

00:06:43 early in those days, about fifty I think, and thought it would be good for us two elder

00:06:54 children to go to the Sudan for a few months just to see a foreign country.

00:07:09 This was a very exciting journey and period altogether for myself and Joan.

00:07:15 In the school in Becklesund, Suffolk, you have this very interesting photograph of you

00:07:21 in the chemistry lab.

00:07:22 Can you tell me about the other girl in the picture?

00:07:25 Yes.

00:07:27 The first thing that's noticeable about this photograph, of course, is that there are only

00:07:32 two girls and a lot of boys.

00:07:36 In the early classes in the school, the girls were in as well as the boys, but at the age

00:07:45 of about fifteen, I think, there was a division and the boys only continued to work at pure

00:07:56 science subjects and the girls in general divided and did more domestic science and

00:08:04 physiology and health care and things of that kind, but anyone who wanted to take serious

00:08:11 scientific subjects was allowed to continue to work with the boys and the two of us did.

00:08:22 So you went to Oxford in what year?

00:08:24 I went to Oxford in thirty-two, no, sorry, twenty-eight.

00:08:31 And you knew perfectly well that what you really wanted to study was chemistry, or actually

00:08:35 biochemistry or chemistry of biochemical molecules.

00:08:39 Yes.

00:08:40 And so you graduated in nineteen...

00:08:44 I took the B.A. degree in 1931 and then the B.Sc. at the end of the research year, that's

00:08:56 in thirty-two.

00:08:57 And you had to decide then where you were going to go.

00:09:01 Yes.

00:09:02 Well, nothing was quite as straightforward as it is now, I mean nobody seemed to expect

00:09:16 one to go on to do a DPhil or a research degree in general, though there was a general idea

00:09:25 that it was a good thing if you could afford it to go on and do some research.

00:09:29 Now again, owing to the fact that there had been very few scientists at Somerville and

00:09:38 that H.M. Powell was a beginner himself, nobody seemed to know of the ordinary way of financing

00:09:47 research by grants from the DSIR.

00:09:54 However, the college gave me a small studentship.

00:10:00 You went to Cambridge almost by accident, didn't you?

00:10:07 Well, I went there as the result of advice by Dr. A. F. Joseph, to whom I wrote.

00:10:23 And he wrote back immediately suggesting that I should go and work with J.D. Burnell

00:10:35 in Oxford in Cambridge, a suggestion which he had had from Professor Lowry of Cambridge

00:10:46 University.

00:10:47 How long did you stay in Burnell's lab in Cambridge?

00:10:53 Two years.

00:10:54 When did you first move on to the problem of the penicillin crystals?

00:11:01 It was considerably later, beginning of the war.

00:11:23 When did you start the work on B-12?

00:11:28 This came in 1948, but the calculations that followed proved very slow and confusing.

00:11:41 And if we'd known what we found out gradually and painfully, how good they were, and believed

00:11:50 them more, we would have got through faster.

00:11:54 But as it was, the length of calculations and our own hesitations slowed us up, and

00:12:07 it took several years instead of the one or two that it would perfectly easily have been

00:12:14 done in.

00:12:15 We first tried the B-12 structure using both wet and dry crystals, and then added an extra

00:12:27 heavy atom in a selenium complex, and still didn't get clear enough maps.

00:12:40 From that stage on, we also sent all the maps backwards and forwards across the Atlantic

00:12:47 by air, whatever weight and expense they appeared to be costing.

00:12:53 And as I say, things began to move very fast, and we began to be very sure about the whole

00:13:00 structure.

00:13:01 And when did you have the structure?

00:13:04 This would be about 1944, I think, or 44, 45, I don't know, I don't know, 54, 55, yes.

00:13:19 So switching to another part of your life, leaving the work, you were involved in international

00:13:27 movements campaigning for peace after the war, which continued for a long while.

00:13:33 And you also have had a lot of international friendships, which have spanned a number of

00:13:37 years.

00:13:38 Yes, well, international friendships and the main international relations arose early and

00:13:49 naturally.

00:13:50 Do you ever come across young students and offer them any advice now, when they are either

00:13:57 thinking of going into science or thinking of going into crystallography in particular?

00:14:02 I think going into science and going into crystallography are perfectly good occupations.

00:14:08 I think you have to look out a bit for what you're working on.

00:14:12 But there's still lots to do.

00:14:14 There's still lots to do.

00:14:15 You still see a wonderful field ahead for anyone who wants to take it up.

00:14:18 Yes, yes.

00:14:19 Thank you very much, Professor Hodgkin.