April 5, 2023

Ashlyn Tsang, Maya Puterman, Noa Essner

10th Grade

May 12, 1910 marks the day one of science’s greatest heroes was born. Dorothy Hodgkin was a chemist whose contributions to the field greatly impacted scientific research. Her love of chemistry began at the young age of ten years old. She was born in Cairo, Egypt, and had an interest in science, particularly botany and archaeology. She then went to school in London. There, she was one of two girls granted the opportunity to study science alongside a class filled with boys. 

Hodgkin's earlier work primarily involved studying different crystals (a scientific field known as crystallography) and their structures, such as the structure of dimethyl thallium halides, under the tutelage of one of her professors, H.M. Powell. This research then expanded to include studying numerous other molecular structures. In addition to her pursuit of knowledge in those disciplines, she helped empower thousands of young women by working as a teacher at a university whilst simultaneously juggling independent research as a Professor at England’s Royal Society, to this day one of the world’s oldest and most prominent academies for scientists.

In a time when the number of female scientists and chemists was significantly disproportionate to the number of men in those fields, Dorothy Hodgkin served as a true trailblazer by making her mark in uncharted territories and laying the groundwork for research, and research methods, that would be the basis of many modern scientific breakthroughs. Despite Dorothy Hodgin suffering from “ulnar deviation,” a condition which caused her hands and joints to be slightly deformed, and made conducting experiments more challenging for her, she continued to study even with the obstacles, and as a result, the entire scientific community remains greatly in her debt.