An asteroid discovered by an observatory in the Soviet Union on this date was named ‘Hodgkin,’ after Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a Nobel-winning British chemist and crystallographer. It was one of many honours Hodgkin received in and after her lifetime, but perhaps the oddest of all is that she is thought to be the only Communist ever to have her portrait hung in 10 Downing Street. Stranger still – the picture was put there by Margaret Thatcher.
Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Egypt in 1910, to British parents, and grew up mostly in Beccles in Suffolk. She first encountered chemistry and crystals as a young girl, and was instantly, as she later wrote, “captured” for life. As an 11-year-old, starting secondary school, she had to insist on her right to study chemistry – which was classed as a boys-only subject, despite the fact that the chemistry teacher was a woman.
At Somerville College, Oxford, Dorothy shone as a chemist and as an activist in left-wing causes. On graduation she was involved in pioneering research at both Oxford and Cambridge, working particularly with JD Bernal, a legendary figure within what is sometimes called the “red science” era – a period, in the 1930s especially, when many if not most leading scientists were Marxists, who believed that scientific progress should be used for the betterment of all mankind, rather than to increase profits. It’s a view that Margaret Thatcher, a few decades later, thoroughly opposed.
By 1935, Crowfoot was publishing scientific papers as sole author, and was recognised as a key mover in the new and exciting field of protein crystallography.
In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, who had been in the diplomatic business until he got sacked for being too sympathetic to the Palestinians. He was another Communist, who retrained as a teacher and became a history tutor to unemployed miners. It was an unconventional marriage – Thomas was away most of the time, working, and Dorothy was in love with JD Bernal – but it seems by all accounts to have been a rich and affectionate one, nonetheless.
Dorothy, Thomas and, inevitably, Professor Bernal, were heavily involved in the peace movement in the 1950s, and therefore banned from entering the USA and subject to secret police attention in the UK, too. Even so, she ended up with an Order of Merit and Fellowship of the Royal Society in this country, honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Freedom of Beccles, to go with her Lenin Peace Prize from the USSR.
Her scientific career went from strength to strength, her work on penicillin, insulin and vitamin B12 saving or improving countless human lives. From her late twenties onwards, after the birth of her first child, Dorothy Hodgkin suffered badly from rheumatoid arthritis. She experienced severe pain, and had to adapt laboratory equipment to allow her permanently distorted hands to use it. In 1964 she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry – and even then some of her most important work was still to come.
She was much loved by colleagues as well as friends, and her modesty and kindness meant fellow scientists were keen to work with her. Amongst the young chemists she mentored in the 1940s was Margaret Roberts, who became Margaret Thatcher. They met again decades later in a very different relationship – Thatcher as a bellicose prime minister, Hodgkin as a leader of the international peace movement. Thatcher's admiration for Hodgkin seems never to have dimmed, however, as shown by her decision to display a portrait of the Marxist scientist at Number Ten. Throughout her life, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was famous for having no enemies – even among her opponents.
By the 1990s she was wheelchair-bound and frail – though still active – and she died in 1994, following a fall. Her memorial service was attended by dignitaries from around the scientific and political world – including Margaret Thatcher.
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Sources:
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=5422
www.nature.com/articles/514304a
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n05/eric-hobsbawm/red-science
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1964/hodgkin/biographical/
www.peoplesworld.org/article/female-nobel-winners-are-rare-one-was-a-british-communist/
I admire her enormously. Apparently she said something like, 'If I ever win the Nobel Prize, the headline will be 'Grandmother wins Nobel Prize' - and it was!