Dorothy Hodgkin

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born 12 May 1910 in England and trained as a chemist at a time when the atomic arrangement inside complex molecules remained guesswork. She refined X-ray crystallography into a tool precise enough to decode biomolecules, confirming the structure of penicillin that Abraham and Chain had proposed, then mapping vitamin B12 in work that earned her the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - the third woman to receive it. She kept her maiden name professionally for twelve years after marrying Thomas Lionel Hodgkin, eventually publishing as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. The insulin structure, which she finally solved in 1969, had occupied her for 35 years. She died 29 July 1994, having opened structural biology by making the invisible legible.