May 12th
Born 12 May 1910; died 29 Jul 1994 at age 84.
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) was an English biochemist and X-ray crystallographer, born in Cairo, Egypt to English parents, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964 for her discoveries, by the use of X-ray techniques, of the structure of biologically important molecules, including penicillin (1946), vitamin B-12 (1956), and later, the protein hormone insulin (1969). Her achievements included not only these structure determinations and the scientific insight they provided but also the development of methods that made such structure determinations possible. (One of her students was Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, the only British prime minister with a degree in science.)
