The Oxford Science Lecture Series
Georgina Ferry
Science writer & broadcaster, biographer of Dorothy Hodgkin
"An Exemplary Life: The Scientific and Humanitarian Legacy of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin"
Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2026
Somerville College, Oxford, 10th March 2026
For 35 years, she tried to see a molecule that was killing millions - and when she finally mapped insulin’s structure, she gave diabetics their lives back. She’s the only British woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Most people have never heard her name.
Dorothy Hodgkin spent her life making the invisible visible. She worked with X-ray crystallography - a technique so demanding it felt less like science and more like learning to read shadows. You couldn’t see molecules. You had to shine X-rays through crystals and interpret the faint patterns they cast - spots and rings that, if read correctly, revealed atomic structure. It was like understanding a building from the shadows it cast - except the building was a million times smaller than the human eye could see, and every calculation had to be done by hand.
Most scientists thought it was impossible. Dorothy made it her life’s work.
Born Dorothy Crowfoot in Cairo in 1910, she fell in love with chemistry as a child. At 10, she was already growing crystals in her bedroom - “faceted like jewels, twinkling in the light,” as her biographer Georgina Ferry describes. That moment mattered. Dorothy herself later recalled: “I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.”
In 1928, she came to Oxford and discovered X-ray crystallography - the key to seeing life at its most fundamental level.
But she was a woman in 1930s science. Oxford restricted access to labs. Cambridge initially refused her entry. Many male colleagues believed women couldn’t manage the mathematics. And then came something even harder: rheumatoid arthritis. By her twenties, her hands were swollen and painfully twisted. The work she had chosen - handling delicate crystals, making precise measurements - became physically agonising. Dorothy didn’t stop. She adapted. Persisted. Endured.
Because she understood something others didn’t yet fully grasp: she was seeing what no one else could—and it could change the world.
Her breakthroughs came one molecule at a time.
• Penicillin (1945) - she solved its structure, enabling mass production of the antibiotic.
• Vitamin B12 (1956) - making treatment for pernicious anaemia possible.
• Insulin (1969) - her greatest challenge, taking 35 years to solve.
As Georgina Ferry said, reflecting on Hodgkin’s work: “The scale and ambition of her work… and the long-term persistence required, are breathtaking.” Insulin was enormous, unstable, and incredibly complex. The calculations were overwhelming. Her arthritis worsened. Still, she continued. Until at last, atom by atom, she solved it.
In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She remains the only British woman ever to receive it.
But perhaps more importantly, she remained what she had always been - quietly determined, collaborative, and deeply committed to science serving humanity. As Ferry observed, Hodgkin was not driven by fame, but by something far greater: “Nobody could be indifferent to the search for the truth about proteins.”
Think about that.
She worked in constant pain. Faced systemic discrimination. Spent decades on calculations most would never attempt. Solved problems many believed unsolvable.
All so that molecules could speak - and medicine could save lives.
Penicillin. Vitamin B12. Insulin.
Millions of lives transformed because one woman refused to accept “impossible.”
Dr Pushpalata Chaure
Director of Studies at Kings Oxford