The making of an exceptional scientist

摘要

When Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964, much was made of her gender. She was only the fifth woman to become a laureate in science, and the first from Britain. Marie Curie had won for both physics and chemistry; the others were Curie s daughter Irene, the biochemist Gerty Cori and the physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer (all four of whom were married to scientists). The Observer newspaper was astonished that the 'affable-looking housewife' Hodgkin had won the prize 'for a thoroughly un-housewifely skill: the structures of crystals of great chemical interest'. Hodgkin was at the time the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professor at the University of Oxford, UK.