In Our Time - Dorothy Hodgkin

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work and ideas of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994), awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for revealing the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin and who later determined the structure of insulin. She was one of the pioneers of X-ray crystallography and described by a colleague as 'a crystallographers' crystallographer'. She remains the only British woman to have won a Nobel in science, yet rejected the idea that she was a role model for other women, or that her career was held back because she was a woman. She was also the first woman since Florence Nightingale to receive the Order of Merit, and was given the Lenin Peace Prize in recognition of her efforts to bring together scientists from the East and West in pursuit of nuclear disarmament.With Georgina Ferry Science writer and biographer of Dorothy HodgkinJudith Howard Professor of Chemistry at Durham UniversityandPatricia Fara Fellow of Clare College, CambridgeProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, in 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin became the first British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, and so far, the only one. It was in chemistry, and the award was specifically, quote,

for her determinations by x-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances, namely penicillin and vitamin B12, and to these she later added insulin. Her discoveries helped with the manufacture of drugs for the treatment of infection, of anemia and of diabetes, and in the words of the pioneer in her field, Lawrence Bragg, another Nobel Prize winner,

her early achievements were, quote, the equivalent of breaking the sound barrier. With me to discuss Doddy Hodgkin's work and life are Patricia Fara, fellow of Claire College, Cambridge, Georgina Ferry, a science writer and biographer of Dorothy Orchkin, and Judith Howard, Professor of Chemistry at Durham University. Judith Howard, Dorothy Orchkin was born in 110. What was remarkable about her childhood? I think because she was born in Cairo in Egypt, she was often on her own because when they were younger, the girls, there were four girls eventually, spent time in Egypt with her parents, but that she would

a lot of the time be on her own and she felt she discovered if you like self-sufficiency and she as the eldest of the four girls she often was looking after them but I think what was remarkable were her parents themselves and her mother in particular had a huge influence on dorothy's life and the way she saw things in her own life her father taught education uh that's broadly right isn't it yes and and her mother taught dorothy a while one to one. And they were tremendously encouraging for her intellectually, even at a very early age.

She did what she wanted to do. Yes, she was encouraged to study natural history, to study plants, flowers. She was encouraged to do drawing, to study all sorts of things that we were free to be followed, both in this country

and at the time in Egypt. What did they teach her that would later tell in her life? Usually, very often people who are that start young and things happen. We say, oh, we can track it back. What could you track back back to that childhood in Cairo and come back to England at a very early age, being, as it were, brought up for a little while by relatives and friends then going to grammar school? Certainly a degree of determination, concentration, I think, and also she was extremely

peace-loving, and that came from her mother. But her mother was talented in many ways. Her mother, in some senses, was self-taught. She came from family where education was. was not in a strict schooling sense. A lot of it was taught at home with her siblings at the time. And Dorothy learned from her mother a great deal without a formal structure of education. And I think the patience, the determination and the peace-loving are some of the characteristics that Dorothy always had with her. And that would take her through to the brilliance that she showed in her scientific career.

And she was allowed to explore. she was allowed to do things that perhaps today children of her age would not be allowed to have a chemistry lab in the attic, for instance. It was not frowned on at that time, and she experimented quite well. Yes, they gave her a chemistry set. One of the big things in her life was getting a chemistry set at a burial age. It was eight or nine or something. Yes, and following her time in cartoon,

a friend of Sir Henry Welcombe, in fact, known as Uncle Joseph, had given her a box with all sorts of chemicals in, so she could go home when she went back to England to do chemical experiments there. But he taught her while they were in Egypt to pretend to be panning for gold. In fact, she found a mineral, which was known as Illmanite. And she was greatly excited by that because she didn't have titanium in her chemical books, but it actually was a mixed oxide of titanium and iron. As you say, she wouldn't get anywhere of health and safety these days, would she?

Because when she came back to England and continued to do it, The local chemist cheerfully gave her acids and all the rest of it. Absolutely. You wouldn't be able to get any of those chemicals from the local chemist today, but she did and she continued to experiment. And I think learned a great deal by teaching herself, but also just learning from books as well, such as was available to her at the time.

One rather idiosyncratic thing that you bring up is that her father being, was it very interested in Egyptian antiques who couldn't be in Egypt? and particularly in mosaics and he gave her a great interest in mosaics which is said to have influenced the way she conducted her later experiments

can you say anything about that? She was particularly fascinated by things archaeological if you like and she was taken on a dig into what is now Jordan and that was to look at some flooring which they discovered and she helped to uncover these mosaics on the floor

and she was particularly careful at following the patterns. And she drew as much as she could at the time she was there, but she took this home with her, and she continued working on those, a scale diagram. They're beautiful drawings which still exist. And of course, this, I mean, crystallography involves a lot of recognition of patterns, appreciating them, understanding them, looking at the symmetry, and so on and so forth.

And not only the care with which she uncovered these in the ground and then painstakingly transferred the patterns to paper and continued that work. I think that was definitely something that would have carried through into her crystallographic research later on. Thank you. Did she know Ferry? What hoops did she have to do just to study chemistry, first at school and then at Oxford? Well, she began, her first exposure to chemistry was at a little tiny primary school she attended, where they grew crystals.

It was just part of the... I didn't have read that. Oh, good. So, where did they grow crystals? How come they grow crystals? She went to her school. There was an organisation called the Parents' National Educational Union, which was set up to train governesses to teach small groups of children in private homes.

And when she was 10, she went to one of these PNEU schools in Beckles, which was near where the family home was, where they'd settled on coming back from the Middle East. And the PNEU would provide. a curriculum that the governesses who ran took the classes had to follow. And one term, they did chemistry, and it consisted mostly of growing crystals. And they grew crystals of copper sulfate, which are the most beautiful blue color. They look like sapphires.

They're just gorgeous to look at. And it's not a difficult thing to do. You just make a solution and dry it out. But you get crystals. So she said at the time, I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals. So when she got the secondary school, obviously she wanted to. to continue with her studies of chemistry. But although she was at a mixed school,

at this particular school, the rule was that chemistry was the boys' subject and the girls did needlework. So how did she get through that barrier? Well, she just, and she had a friend, Nora, who both wanted to do it. They just put their feet down and said, but we want to do chemistry.

And they were eventually allowed to. And I think it probably had something to do with the fact that the chemistry teacher at this school was a woman, again very unusual. And she did chemistry. compared with all the other subjects, she got one of the top marks in the whole of the country for their general school certificate,

but chemistry wasn't her strongest subject, but she persisted, and she persisted in the six months. Then she had a bit of trouble getting to Oxford. Can you tell us about that and how she surmounted it or was helped surmounted it? The school she attended was an ordinary state grammar school, which her father had wanted her to go to because of his own interests in education,

but it wasn't used to preparing people for Oxford, and her parents hadn't paid enough attention to make sure she studied the right subjects. So to do chemistry at Oxford, she needed to have at least two sciences, and she only had one. She only had chemistry. She hadn't done anything else. And she needed more mathematics,

and she needed to have done a bit more physics. And she was very young. And she needed Latin. And she needed Latin. Everybody needed Latin in order to go to Oxford. But because she was still very young, she was only 16 when she'd taken her school certificate. So she had a year in hand.

and her parents organised one-to-one tuition for her with various friends and the head teacher of the school to get her through the Latin, the extra science subject she did, which was botany, and a lot more mathematics. And she was then able to pass the entrance exam to read chemistry at Oxford. So discovering crystals at primary school,

finding a teacher chemistry at the local grammar school, and she also read a book by William Bragg, one of his Christmas lectures, the 1915 lecture, lecture about crystallography. And so the marriage was consummated. Yes, it was a marriage made in heaven. As Judith said, Dorothy's mother was incredibly encouraging of her scientific ambitions and gave her this book by Bragg, which contained a paragraph about the discovery of X-ray crystallography, which he and his son had won the Nobel Prize for. And it said, by this means, we can see atoms.

And Dorothy was incredibly excited by that statement, because atoms at the time were, almost a philosophical concept. The idea that you could actually see them, and you can't really see them, but you could see where they were through using X-ray cross-christilography, was very exciting to her. She was in her mid-teens at this point,

and she filed it away and decided that's what she wanted to do in the long term. And that's, thank you very much. Patricia Farah, so she got to Oxford to carry out research, and she decided research chemistry. Again, that wasn't without his difficult, is. Oh, I think the odds were stacked up against girls from the minute that they were born, and she was

very fortunate in having very supportive parents and a school that did at least teach her some of the scientific subjects. When she got to Oxford, she would have realised that only one in four students was allowed to be a woman. The number of women at Oxford was capped at that time, and there were obviously very few women in the science classes. I mean, she was way, way outnumbered by the men. a lot of lecturers who really still thought that women shouldn't be studying science. There were particularly difficulties about practical classes. Once she'd graduated, there were still all sorts of difficulties for her to overcome. The women tended to get channeled into the lesser-paid jobs.

A lot of laboratory heads were very averse to taking women. So I think she had an enormous number of challenges to overcome at every single stage, really, from the minute that she was born. She got a first, so she must be recognisably bright from the beginning. There weren't many firsts in those days. She was only the third woman at Oxford to get a first in chemistry. So they knew she was up to something and that would have paid rather more attention to her. Why did she move to Cambridge?

She moved to Cambridge because she was offered a research position by Bernal, and she was very interested in... John Desmond Bonar. John Desmond Bonal, who was one of the leading researchers into X-ray crystallog. at this stage. He was one of the people who was particularly interested in the relationship between biology and physics, which at that time was an area that people weren't really looking at. At Oxford, the whole time Dorothy Hodgkin was at Oxford, she had to move her lab around from place to place, because there wasn't a biochemistry department. But when she went to Cambridge, there was a whole

group of people who were interested in the same sort of subjects as she was. And the Bragg's father and son were very instrumental in this and it was a new area, as you've suggested, Marks, not even recognising it, as it were, so it's a new area. And that seemed to make it a more, more open a door for women. I think that's generally true. I think it's also very important for these early women in science to have found a particular supervisor who was supportive of women. And for me, it seems an absolute no-brainer that if you want to employ a researcher,

you should go for a woman because for her to have got to that level, means she's exceptionally bright, exceptionally determined. Women were ready to work under harder conditions for longer times and for less money. And it seems to me a very sensible strategy to accumulate a group of women around you. Bernal saw this. What did she learn when she was with him in Cambridge? She learnt about the techniques of x-ray crystallography. He had developed a photographic technique,

which drastically speeded up the way that you could process. the crystals and she was working with him very closely there and she co-authored quite a few papers with him as well during that time. Can you explain what this photographic technique was? Of x-ray crystallography. Yes. In x-rays are really light with a very, very high energy, very high frequency light and you shine them through a crystal and you can see different atoms in the crystal cause spots, black spots, to go on a photographic plate.

The trouble is if there's something like a hundred atoms in a complicated molecule, you take lots and lots of different photographs from different angles. The mathematics of working that all out becomes extremely, extremely complicated. There's two problems. One's

the mathematics of working it out. The other is the sort of physical difficulty of getting a tiny, tiny crystal in the right place at the right angle, making sure that it's stable, it doesn't dissolve or dry out. So there's two types of problem in this work. Thank you. Judith Howard.

Patricia has explained some of the difficulty. Could you continue with this? Because the computers were lagged in Oxford at the time and in Cambridge compared with America and away behind today. So it was almost as it were handicraft work. Can you just explain how she had to distinguish with these hundreds and hundreds of spots

which would change from wherever you took it? So how'd she do it? Well, Dorothy, when she was working with Bernal, I think one of the breakthroughs in terms of the biological specimens, this is slightly on the side, but I'll get there in a minute, was that they needed to keep these biological specimens wet. If they dried out, they didn't diffract, and you didn't get the black spots. You get loads of black splodges, but you didn't really get the diffraction pattern.

What was the only way possible to measure those spots on a photograph, plate was by I. One created a scale. It could have been 1 to 10, it could have been 1 to 100, but there was a scale that was made by the operator, i.e. Dorothy. That scale was used to measure the intensity. In other words, how black were the spots. Those numbers were then written down against the, each spot had a label, let's just say from the point of view of mathematics. You wrote a number down against the label. You had hundreds of these labels and spots and numbers, then there were no computers. The way of using these, the mathematics required summations.

In order to make the summations, these wonderful people, Arnold Beaver's and Henry Lipson, had made something called Beaver's Lipson strips, which are wonderful device. It was almost like in the same way as slide rules, were and log tables before we had computers. It was that sort of thing. By using these strips,

and you literally put a strip which was less than a centimeter, wide with a lot of numbers on, on the table, and any one column in the vertical sense, you added up and you got another number. This sounds crazy sort of way of doing it, but that enabled you to do the full up Fourier summation, which was needed to put into the mathematics to work backwards to the atomic positions from the crystal that had given you the diffraction pattern. So it's incredible painstaking manual in a sense of work, and this was a woman who got severe arthritis in her hands when she was 28. would cycle around Oxford with these boxes of beaver's lips and strips in a cycle bag.

And they were cleverly arranged that one set was for cosines, one set was for sign functions, and Wobitai, you if you either drop them mix them up or anything else, you could no longer do the mathematics. But it was incredibly painstaking, not only taking the photographs, which took hours, measuring the spots by I, which was a lot more work, and then adding these numbers up, then feeding them into the mathematics. The early programable computers, of course, were coming in, but we didn't have in this country ones that were large enough, fast enough, if you like, by the time she was working on vitamin B12,

she was by then working with Ken Troublood in California, who had a better, bigger, faster computer. And there were several attempts that everywhere Dorothy went to work with collaborators, she was keen to use their computers because every time there was an advancement, it was a huge help for crystallography. Yes, thank you very. Georgina Ferry, she went under study proteins.

Why is that particularly challenging? Well, proteins for a start are extremely important. There are hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of proteins and they do all the important jobs in the body. So some of them are structural things like keratin that you've got in your hair. Some of them are enzymes that act as catalysts and spritons. bead up biochemical processes. Some of them are hormones that send messages around the body.

So they're really the workhorses. They tend to be very large. So they have, whereas, I don't know, something like penicillin, which she later worked on, had a couple of dozen atoms in it. Most protein molecules have thousands. And because there are simply so many atoms, the kind of calculation that Judith has been talking about is incredibly difficult to do. They're also difficult to make grow into christmas.

In order to get a crystal, which this is part of your craft that you've been talking about, one of the crafts is to purify the thing you're interested in enough to make it grow crystals, because normally it's in solution. It doesn't want to grow crystals, and you've got to have a crystal in order to do crystallography. So Dorothy first came across proteins when she was with Bernal in Cambridge, when somebody gave him a crystal of pepsin, which is a digestive enzyme. And she and Bernal took x-ray photographs of this, and that was the first time anyone had ever managed to get an x-ray photograph.

of a protein. And although they weren't anywhere near getting a solution of the structure, it was the first step. That's regarded as the dawning of protein crystallography because it meant one day you would be able to get a structure. When she came back to Oxford, she had a fellowship at Somerville College, which was her first proper job. And I think I'd also like to stress the importance of having this all-female college in Oxford who gave her tremendous support. They gave her her first job as a fellow. when she subsequently had children, they gave her maternity, paid maternity leave, which was unheard of in those days. And I think that all-female environment was tremendously supportive to her.

Anyway, she came back to Oxford, and the Professor of Organic Chemistry gave her crystals of insulin. So she first had insulin in 1934 and took photographs of it successfully the following year, but it took her many, many more decades to solve the structure. Until the 1960s. Until the late 1960s. Nevertheless, she had a paper in nature in 1935, with her sole name on it, having successfully got a diffraction photograph of insulin. And that sent her straight to the top of the field internationally, while still in her mid-20s. Patricia, Patricia, Farah, how did she advance the understanding of penicillin?

Most people think penicillin, Fleming, it's solved. Yes, that's a very nice British myth, isn't it? Yes, Alexander Fleming's, so let's concentrate on this one. The penicillin wafed in through the window and killed all the bacteria. That part of it is true, except penicillin is a very unstable molecule. It's very difficult to isolate. And so Fleming just sort of put all that on one side. It was actually about a decade later that Chain and Florey at Oxford started to carry out research into it.

What were the difficulties? What was there to do? One of the things they want, well, the first thing was to do is. establish how well it worked. So they set up an experiment with eight mice and they gave them all a bacterial infection and they gave four mice penicillin and the other four mice didn't have penicillin and the ones with the penicillin all survived and the others didn't. So it was clear that penicillin was really, really important. The thing was they wanted to use it for soldiers during the Second World War but the problem was mass producing it in sufficient amounts to be able to to use it to treat patients.

And one of the reasons for analysing its structure was in order to be able to synthesise the drug, which would be a much more efficient way of producing it. That was one of the reasons why it was so vital to find out what its structure was. And how did she go about that? She did lots and lots of x-ray crystallography. There were problems in getting different samples of penicillin.

It ended up there were two versions, one from America and one from Britain, and she analysed the American version, which was simpler. She also, Judith has mentioned computers before, she introduced the use of computers into this sort of research. She found it was a naval programme that was used for sending cargoes on ships to different parts of the world. And she adapted that.

It was a big calculator using punch cards, Hollerith punch cards with holes in and she used that to carry out all the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calculations that were needed and that was the real start of computing in this sort of work. This sort of work. And was she

when was she aware that she was how are you aware when you're doing experiments where you don't know what's going to happen that you do know it's going to happen? Oh I think she was for one thing she was a great perfectionist she would never, even if she thought she was getting very near the answer, she would insist on going on and on and she was a bit reticent about publishing

until she got everything totally and utterly worked out. And this particular research was very much hampered by military secrecy during the war and then by commercial secrecy afterwards. So it's actually quite difficult to negotiate all of that. And it did take her several years to work it out because it's such a complicated molecule. And what was the effect having worked just, out? What was the effect of that, the result of that? Well, one of the results was that it made it

easier to synthesize penicillin, although it was apparently very difficult to synthesize that particular form of penicillin, but it certainly helped the proliferation of antibiotics after the war, which of course have completely revolutionised modern medicine and health expectations. Judith Howard, we're talking now about vitamin B12. Can you tell the listeners,

what that is and why it's important and how she said about cracking it. Yes, vitamin B-12 is one of a family of vitamins, B-vitamins, in fact. It came to Dorothy, a gentleman called Lester Smith, who was working with Glaxo at the time, the early form of the company that we now know, and it had been extracted from liver. If you go back before that, when there were problems of people with anemia, they'd been fed large doses of liver in some form or another. These crystals were extracted from that. The chemical composition was not known.

It was really very exciting for Dorothy to be given these crystals from the pharmaceutical company, but also to discover by some form of analysis that these crystals of this vitamin contained a metal atom, which was unusual. Sorry, now why was she giving? them. Did she ask for them? Did they know she was very good? What was going on? Well, what was going on was she was well known in Oxford and beyond Oxford as an extremely

brilliant crystallographer. She had worked on penicillin that was known at this time because we're talking about. Penicillum was solved in 1945. It wasn't published until later for reasons Patricia had mentioned. We're now into the late 40s, early 50s when these crystals have been extracted. and they've been extracted in different forms in different places, but anyway, Lester Smith knew of Dorothy's work in Oxford connections through the pharmacology departments and so on. Anyway, she was given the crystals because she was known to be an excellent crystallographer, and she was keen to study compounds of biological interest and importance.

So the major thing about vitamin B12 was its chemical composition was unknown. You mentioned earlier the Bragg mentioning the light breaking the sound barrier. And he said this after she'd solved the structure of vitamin B12 because through crystallography they actually analyzed effectively the chemical composition it was unknown before. She discovered what methodology she could use because there was a metal atom in the center of the structure.

She had produced the full atomic components. constitution of this vitamin, it was the first structure that they had produced full three-dimensional data. A lot of the data early on that we've been talking about was produced in two dimensions, a projection, so we didn't have enough information to, it was assumed by other means, but it was not done by the computational work that I was mentioning. But vitamin B12 was the first in its form to be fully solved, and I mean solved by analysis effectively, because the chemical composition was unknown. And so it's a really exciting structure at the time,

and it was published in 1956. So we're really in the early days of what one could call protein crystallography then. And what did it cure, what did it solve? What was the results of that? Once its composition was known, it was known to be effective in penitious anemia. And so once its chemical composition, was known, it could be synthesized, and chemists could then go ahead and produce the medicine that was needed to cure anemia. But I think it's also important to say that simply

solving such a large molecule opened up the prospect that many other such large molecules, which do important jobs in the body, could be sold. Because for a long time, chemists were rather dismissive of crystallographers. They thought they were just some kind of technician, and didn't really think that they would solve these naughty questions in chemistry. And what Dorothy showed first with penicillin and then with vitamin B12 was if you know what you're doing, it surely well can answer those questions. And it gave people hope that they would eventually be able to solve the structure of proteins, which were the big challenge.

Yeah, because she could identify elements in some of these compounds that people hadn't realised were there. So that was very important. It wasn't just a measuring job. She was actually analysing. the fundamental components of these molecules. What place did collaboration play in these experiments? Oh, I think as far as I can tell, Dorothy Hodgkin

was one of the most collaborative researchers in existence. And from every account, she was just a really wonderful person who supported her students, who supported her co-researchers. And although she did win lots of glory for herself, that wasn't her aim. Her aim was to build up a research community. and to look after everybody who worked for her and with her. I think one of the reasons for that is partly her nature,

but partly it's to do with the particular branch of science she was in X-ray crystallography because it involves maths, it involves chemistry, it involves biology, it involves physics. There is no one person who's got all those skills. So you have to have a team. And what she was a brilliant at was building teams of people who had all these different skills and who could work together. to solve the problem. The other thing that I think the other dimension of her collaborativeness was her interest in supporting people from overseas

so that she collaborated with people in China, in India, all over Europe, in the USSR. And so she was constantly interested in what was going on in the whole world of science, not just in her own lab. How did she come to be awarded the Nobel Prize? There's quite a bit of hesitation. And I'm, from what I read from She herself was rather disappointed that she didn't get it sooner than she got it. After, as it were, breaking the sound barrier, which Lawrence Frank said. She had to wait quite a while for people to recognise that she'd broken the sound barrier. It took eight years from the first time she was nominated from 56 until 64.

And she was nominated several times and other people repeatedly got the Nobel Prize instead. And in the end, several scientists in particular, Max Perutz, who sold the structure of hemoglobin. He got a group of people together and petitioned for her. her to win the Nobel Prize. And in the end, in 1964, she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on her own. She was the sole person to be nominated. Because it's often in groups. It's often in groups. There's a maximum of three, but it often is a shared prize, but she got it. The headlines were quite extraordinary. Some of the headlines said, an affable looking housewife has won the Nobel Prize, or else there was another one said,

Mother of three wins the Nobel Prize and they were far more interested in the fact that she was a mother and of course she had to be a housewife because she was a woman and a grandmother of course. She was by that stage, yes. When she first knew that she was going to have a grandchild she lay in bed one night and she had a sort private joke to herself I can just see the headlines.

Grandmother wins Nobel Prize and it was pretty much like that. Anyway, she won it, Judith. What difference did it make to her when she won the Nobel Prize? Clearly personal satisfaction, but as Patricia said, she didn't chase honours. No, but in terms of her work, I should have phrased that better. What difference did it make to her work but that she won the Nobel Prize? I suspect funding was easier. I mean, Dorothy was good at getting money.

She used as cleverly as she possibly could at the time that she acquired any funding. But she was able to get more funding, to bring more researchers into her, group to bring more researchers, as Georgina has said, from all over the world. And people really did flock to Oxford at that time and over decades since. But I think really she was already internationally known. She'd been giving papers around the world on these amazing discoveries that she'd made. But she was invited everywhere, and she went to places that she could go to it as far as possible, both politically and physically.

Yes, I think it was an enormous help to her to have won the prize. I would have said from an international recognition funding point of view, helping others, and that's what she was very, very good at. And real funding came into Oxford as a result, because she had difficulty with funding in the early days. Indeed. Yes. Yes, I would dispute that, actually.

She was one of very few people to get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, right from the early 40s. And they funded her for longer than they funded anybody else. she also got funding from the Nuffield Foundation she got funding from the Science Research Council I would suggest that when she got the Nobel Prize the big difference it made was the international profile it gave her among people who weren't scientists

she already had an international profile among x-ray crystallographers she was extremely well known she'd won lots of other honours but by becoming a Nobel Prize winner her name began to be known internationally and that meant that yes, she could give a lot of talks about her science, but she could also start to really campaign about the issues that concerned her that were to do with peace and social justice, which was something she'd always believed but had kept private.

Now, with a Nobel Prize, she was in a position to speak out about things like the war in Vietnam, which she was heavily opposed to the East-West conflict, the Cold War, She was a great supporter of both Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union and China. And so it was the international profile it gave her, I think, that she really valued. And during all these years, her research on insulin was ticking away decade after decade. It's the thing that gave her the greatest pleasure, probably because it was the most difficult problem that she'd ever had to tackle.

And she was enormously gratified. There was a wonderful story. She was invited to an international Congress. in America. And there was a gap in the program. There was going to be a talk about a rock that had just been brought back from the moon, but there was health and safety problems about it. So there was a gap in the agenda, and she was asked to give a talk on insulin. And what she did was choose the youngest member of her research team, Tom Bundell, who's himself extremely distinguished now, to give the talk about insulin. And I think that's a wonderful anecdote which illustrates what a

generous, unassuming person she was. You wanted to come in? Yes, I think as well as the international collaboration, she had a big team in her lab. And in fact, after she won the Nobel Prize, and her husband was living in Ghana at this point, he had a job there. And she was spending quite a lot of time with him.

She was travelling around the world, giving all these talks. She wasn't actually in the lab doing the work at the bench much of the time. And so it was the team she had left there who were using all these new techniques and pushing, pushing, the problem on until that final moment when she was there,

when for over what she described as a wonderful weekend, she and her closest colleagues actually built physically, built with their hands, a three-dimensional model of the insulin molecule, and it just appeared before their eyes. But, I mean, I did meet someone when I was writing my book who said, Dorothy didn't solve insulin. Guy Dudsson solved insulin.

And I put this to Guy, Guy, who was her right-hand. man at the time. And he said, no, no, that wasn't true at all. In a way, we were the experiment. Dorothy pulled us together as the team. We were the experiment. And so it was her inspiration and leadership that made it possible to solve that structure. And no one individual could ever have done it on their own. They've been glancing references to her political activity. We'll talk a little bit about this. She was from the very beginning a fierce nuclear disarmar. She was

she's been said to be a communist but that isn't proved but she was certainly a socialist and a pacifist and went around the world. It's been said increasingly as a Nobel Prize when I're talking about this and it was said that if she'd lived a bit longer she would have got a Nobel Peace Prize for the work that she did. That says maybe. Can you

just say how that fitted into her other work Patricia? Well I think a lot of scientists at that time had quite left leanings. I mean, the most obvious example is John Desmond Bonnell, who was a member of the Communist Party. And in 1931, there was a big Soviet delegation came over to London, inspired, well, ordered by Stalin, and talked about the function of science, about whether science is just about acquiring pure knowledge for its own sake, or whether science should be useful and whether it should improve society. And I think Dorothy Hodgkin and Needham and John Desmond Bunnell, I think a lot of people of her generation felt very strongly that the whole point of science was it should be useful, and it should improve society, and it should improve people's lives.

I think it's worth mentioning that she went to Russia with Bernal in 1953 because America had refused her a visa to go to a protein conference in California because when she filled in the form for the visa, it was at the height of the McCarthyite, communist panic, and she'd filled in all the organisations she had ever belonged to, starting with the girl guides and ending up with something called Science for Peace, which the Americans regarded as a Communist Front organisation. And so she was refused a visa to go to this terribly important protein conference, and the American scientists were aghast that she should have been

refused this visa. But the opportunity came up to go to Moscow instead, and so she did. And she was hoping to visit lots of Russian labs while she was there and found it rather frustrating that actually they seem to be just taken to lots of big banquets and drink an awful lot of vodka and didn't see as much science as they would have liked. But she met Russian scientists at conferences. What do you think she achieved in her efforts at nuclear disarmament? She was never somebody who stood on a soapbox and shouted. What do you think she achieved? I think she kept people talking to each other. I think probably the most significant difference she made was not in relation to Russia but in relation to China. Of course, in relation to

Russia, the one thing we haven't mentioned yet is one of her most famous students who was Margaret Roberts, as was, who became Margaret Thatcher. And Margaret Thatcher was somebody who always admired Dorothy enormously, who had taught her at Somerville College. And Dorothy went to see her in the 80s and tried to persuade her to go and talk to Mikhail Gorbachev. And Margaret Thatcher did indeed go and talk to Mikhail Gorbachev. Was that through Dorothy's persuasion? We can't really say lots of people were trying to persuade her to speak to Gorbachev at the time, but she was one of those voices.

And I think it's probably fair to say that she would have had some influence. I'm getting to the end now. She's the only British woman who won a Nobel Prize. Why do you think she's not better known, Patricia Parr? I mean, Marie Curie is well known and Marie Curie's daughter's well known and so on. Madam Curie is well known. because she was the first woman's win a Nobel Prize. I personally think she's an absolutely appalling role model.

When people talk now about the need for role models to encourage more women into science, Mary Sklodowska Curie is presented as someone who's always alone in the laboratory, who sacrificed her life, her interests to science. Dorothy Hodgkin was, seems to me, a very, very nice, warm, generous person. She had a family whom she absolutely adored. She just got on with the work in a very quiet, unassuming way. And for some reason, we like to have great geniuses, great heroes of science, who was rather nasty or got some scandalous story to tell.

She, to me, is the absolute role model of what a woman in science should be. So role models don't get attracted, don't attract publicity, Huda. This could be another debate, Mel. Anyway, I think you've given her a great deal of restrestoration or sent her reputation out into the world. She was a very gentle person in so many ways and she worked tirelessly for peace, for science, and also to try and use science for peaceful means and to try and help people generally. And she really did care about the world and about people. and it's that caring aspect, that gentle nature.

There's an ambition that was muted, the teaching, the general sharing-caring attitude that she had, that permeated the teams that we had in Oxford. And that continued way beyond her science and into federations like perkwash and so on. Thank you very much. Thanks Judith Howard, Georgina Ferry and Patricia Farah. And if you have a topic for us,

If you think deserves a radio audience, please send your ideas using the contact page on our website or on Twitter using the hashtag IOT Listener Week. It's listener week again, right? By the 25th October, one will be the subject of our programme on the 5th of December. Next week, we're discussing Rousseau's ideas on education

and how to preserve children from society's corruption. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I wanted to talk about the two wonderful portraits of her. The first one was commissioned by the Royal Society in the 1970s when they decided it was really time

that they had a picture of a woman up on the wall. And she and Henry Moore had both been nominated of the Order of Merit at the same time. And Henry Moore produced some wonderful drawings of her hands, as we've said, she had very bad rheumatoid arthritis. And rather than focusing on her face or anything else. He just drew these hands which look all sort of gnarled. They look like sort of old tree roots. And I think that's a great tribute to her perseverance and her technical

ability that she went on being a scientist, even though her hands were like that. And then the other wonderful drawing, wonderful painting, which is in the National Portrait Gallery, is by Maggie Hamling, where she shows Dorothy Hodgkin when she was already quite elderly and she's got white hair. and she shows her with four hands. So it's rather like a cartoon version that these hands are sort of blurred to emphasise how constantly active she was. And her desk is all piled up with stuff.

And there's a large insulin model and then there's a half-eaten sandwich next to it and piles of paper. I always think it's a bit like a memento Mori that the insulin model is the scientific knowledge that will persevere and last forever. but Dorothy Hodgkin and a half-eaten sandwich are both very frail, fragile, and they're going to decay, but the science will remain forever.

I know the painter. Maggie had spent some time just watching Dorothy at home before she did paintings, gathering information, but with these hands and I used to watch as a student the same way, you just wondered how she could turn over the pages, and we weren't working on glorified colour computer screens. then we had just pages of paper. And she was turning over the pages of the foyeres of the insulin map

because at this stage she was working on the water structure. All protein structures contain water. So if you imagine stacking balls together, round spherical balls, you get gaps in between. And the gaps in between contain water. And this is very loose terminology. But the water structure hadn't been worked out it was important and she was working on that

when she was, Maggie was painting the painting. Maggie didn't understand the nature of the insulin molecule, how could she? But what she did understand was the importance of the colours. And she realised that if she painted a red ball, a black ball and swapped them around, it would completely change the chemical structure. And she mentioned this at the time, which always amused me.

But sorry, I'll pass over to Georgina while I fill in the other gaps. Yeah, I think I just want to. wanted to go back to her very earliest origins and what it was, because this is a, I think it's a question we all need to ask when it comes to trying to encourage more young women to go into science. What is it you need to give them, to give them the strength and the determination to go on? And I think a lot of it had to do with Dorothy's parents.

And what I think they really brought was a respect for intellectual inquiry, both of them. It was important it was both of them, not just her father, but also her mother, who went on to build an authority on ancient textiles, despite having had no formal education, of really any description herself. And then a very strong social conscience, a sense of duty to make the world a better place.

And finally, a very strong sense of international solidarity, really, and appreciation, respect for difference. Dorothy's parents had spent a lot of time in North Africa, and they made very good friends among the Egyptian and Sudanese people that they met. So those three things, respect for intellectual inquiry, social conscience and respect for difference, I think were things that really informed her whole life. Judith.

Around the same time, one of the major inferences, I think, was the fact that her mother, very sadly, lost four of her brothers in the first war. And I think Dorothy picked up from her... her mother, not surprisingly, the futility of war struck home, and that stayed with her. She was very conscious of that. Her mother felt that she had a calling to make the world a better place to live in, and that also, in a sense, was transmitted to Dorothy in some form,

and that was carried with her throughout her life, the wanting to do things for other people, which she did, and to try and make the world a better place for everybody, and not taking differences between nationalities and creed in colour. And that peacefulness just stayed with her. And I think what that's, you know, the culture of science today actually isn't very like that. And I was just rather interested to notice recently that Welcome, which is the funder of most of the, or a very large proportion of the biomedical science in the UK today,

has recently set up a new project to look at the research culture and to try to shift. it in the direction of being more collaborative and kinder. They've used the word kind. And that there's really a sense that the way things have gone, it's just gone too far in the direction of being competitive. And I think Dorothy's example shows that it is possible to do very great science without it having to be like that. Judith.

I'm pleased to say that crystallography is still like that. It is a very caring, sharing community. we spoke earlier, we need each other. We need people who are good at machinery, computers, growing crystals, extracting the compounds from the biology in the first place. We do need collaboration. And the ground that was laid by the Braggs, Perrout, Bernal, Dorothy, Kathleen Lonsdale, many of the early pioneers, that was the way they worked. They needed help from each other. It continues that way. We work on completely different materials, but we all use computers, we all use often the same software, we're sharing things and we're sharing

advances. So if someone has an advance in one area, we share it through our international meetings into another area and we develop instrumentation by having ideas and sharing them and sharing them with the instrumental manufacturers as well. When I talk to women who are in science and talk about the difficulties of getting to the higher levels of science, one of the problems that they psych most often is the difficulty and the expense of childcare. That is a constant, constant refrain. And Dorothy Hodgkin benefited from Somerville insisting on paying her proper maternity leave. Somerville College insisted on paying her during while she was pregnant. I mean, we haven't really talked about it, but while all this insulin and B12 and everything else was going on,

she had three babies and she looked after them. But in those days, if you were sufficiently rich, you could afford to have an army of nannies to look after your children for you. And I think that's something that's very different from those early women scientists. The ones who were able to succeed with children were because they had people to look after the children as well. Whereas nowadays, that's not the case because people aren't paid enough to buy effective childcare for their children. So I think that's quite an important difference. And I think this thing of childcare still remains one of the biggest obstacles for women in science. There are creches, there are nurseries, but they finish at unrealistic times of day.

And they're pitched at a price, which means it's not really worthwhile one of the parents working, because one parent will have to put all their salary into paying for the childcare. And that's got to change if we're going to have more equality in scientific research. Do you agree with that, Judith? Yes, I think today things are very different from the time Dorothy was having her family and doing her major work. Kathleen Nonsdale ran into the same sort of problems in a way. But she had helped amazingly from Bragg who employed her to come back from Leeds. And she was able to, he put money into the kitty, if you like, for her to have child care to help her concentrate on the work.

But the one thing I was going to mention was really got nothing to do with the modern situation. both of those women I've mentioned had amazing ability to concentrate and they learnt to concentrate no matter what no matter which child was screaming or what was carrying on and they really could concentrate on the work in small spaces almost anywhere they were so passionate about what they were doing but they did have help and Dorothy's sister at one time with her family came to live with Dorothy's family

and so there were more children but more caring sharing of the caring in the household and again with the husband as well. So I think there were a lot of pluses at the time she was doing it, although you'd have said there were huge difficulties to overcome, the fact that the social background was quite complex but different from the way it is today. And I think we hadn't entered into the rut race that we may be said to be in at the moment. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you for inviting us.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Lauren Overn here and I'm calling all music lovers and in particular radiohead fans because on Desert Island discs I'm casting away Tom York. He talks to me about how he discovered music, his love of breaking things, what he felt about his posh school and how he greeted the band's initial success. He also shares the life advice REM's Michael Stipe gave him and describes his personal ambitions for the future. And of course he'll be explaining the reasons why he has chosen

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