Dorothy Hodgkin: From Nobel Laureate to Google Doodle

http://www.google.com/doodles/dorothy-hodgkins-104th-birthday

The first time I heard of Dorothy Hodgkin was last May when Google featured her model of Penicillin as its doodle. Side note: I actually didn't see it myself, but was lucky enough to have a mother-in-law who was interested in my science and pointed it out to me. Having completed my dissertation in X-ray crystallography, I was surprised to not have heard of her before: the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances (1).” The two other women were of course Marie Curie, and unbeknownst to me, her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie. Dorothy Hodgkin determined the X-ray structures for important biomolecules, such as penicillin and Vitamin B12, as well as making her mark on protein crystallography. Her structure of Vitamin B12 allowed for the synthesis of the vitamin to treat megaloblastic anemia. I’ve written a separate post describing the field of X-ray crystallography in more detail here.

 Structure of Vitamin B12, one of the most complex structures that  had been determined by 

X-ray Crystallography at the time.  Image courtesy of chemicalheritage.org

It was apparent from my readings into her life that Dorothy Hodgkin is an example of the type of scientist I always hoped to be: committed, passionate, and steadfast about her work and its implications, well rounded and diverse in her interests, humble, yet confident in what she wanted in her life from an early age. Of course, sexism is not hard to find in her story. The headlines when she won the Nobel Prize in 1964 was "British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three." in the Telegraph and "Oxford housewife wins Nobel" in The Daily Mail. But she seemed to rise above it all.

Her father taught and worked in archaeology in Egypt, the Sudan, and Jerusalem and Dorothy would visit at different times in her life (2). She carried a love of Africa throughout her life, later making many trips to Ghana while her husband worked at the University of Ghana, and even for a time as advisor to the Ghanaian president (2,4). Eventually, her daughter would teach in Zambia (2).

Dorothy’s life is rife with the stuff of good dramas. According to a 1998 biography, her very influentional advisor, J.D. Bernal and she were lovers on and off for years, even after she married (3). The politics of this advisor, as well as her husband’s were of a communist persuasion and she was banned from travelling to the U.S. without a CIA waiver (4). It is unclear if she held the same political views but after being refused entry to the U.S. to attend a conference organized by Linus Pauling, she travelled to the Soviet Union, attempting to set up scientific collaborations. She also visited China many times throughout her career and had many collaborations with Chinese and Indian scientists. She campaigned for inclusion of countries into the International Union of Crystallography such as China and the Soviet Union, who were banned for political reasons (4).

Dorothy believed it was the responsibility of scientists to help make the world a better place. She was president of the Pugwash council from the mid 1970s to late 1980s (4). Never heard of the Pugwash conferences? Neither had I. Pugwash is an international organization established in the years following WWII, bringing together scholars with the goal towards international conflict resolution and nuclear and chemical weapon disarmament.

Dorothy Hodgkin, image courtesy of chemicalheritage.org

What drew me to her, more than her politics though was her dedication to solving a particular problem. She studied one protein, insulin for more than 35 years, eventually solving the structure. In her Nobel Lecture she recounts a sentence from the W.H. Braggs book “Concerning the Nature of Things” which peaked her interest in the field as a teenager, “”Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision over ten thousand times and we can now ‘see’ the individual atoms and molecules.”” A few sentences later she writes, “The process of 'seeing' with X-rays was clearly more difficult to apply to such systems than my early reading of Bragg had suggested; it was with some hesitation that I began my first piece of research work with H. M. Powell…(5).” Four years after giving this lecture she finally determined the structure. When she originally set out in the 1930s, the technology and methodology was not advanced enough to study proteins. She continued to.. Her structure contributed to the knowledge of receptor/hormone binding and allowed for reliable synthesis of the hormone as a treatment for diabetes. 

This part of her story resonated with me as I remember seeing the beautiful pictures of protein structures in late bachelor studies and trying to wrap my mind around how one came to these pictures. Indeed, I would discover it was more complex than even I imagined. And I was lucky to benefit from all the amazing advances that semi-automate the steps along the way from setting up hundreds of crystal conditions (or in my case, thousands) to shooting the crystals with X-rays in California while sitting in my house in Baltimore to solving the structure using information gained by other crystallographers on similar proteins. Even with these advances, it took three and a half years to determine the structure of my one and only protein, Plasmodium falciparum Atg8.

It was with some sadness that I left the crystallography world behind, with its helpful and always willing to commiserate, yet highly critical, compatriots. My experiences make me appreciate all the more the contributions that Dorothy made in the then male-dominated and inchoate field of biomolecular and protein X-ray crystallography.

References:

1. (2014). Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin - Facts. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media.

2. (2014). Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin – Biography. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Retrieved August 24, 2014. Retrieved from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1964/hodgkin-bio.html.

3. Ferry, Georgina (1998). Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life. London: Granta Books.

4. Howard, J.A.K. (2003). Dorothy Hodgkin and her contributions to biochemistry. Nat Rev MCB. 4, 891-896.

5. Hodgkin D.C. (1964). The X-ray Analysis of complicated molecules. Nobel Lectures. Chemistry 1963-1970, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972.