Dorothy Hodgkin and the Year of Crystallography

The UK has a long and successful history in crystallography, but among its numerous Nobel Prize winners in the field, the only woman was headlined as a mere 'Oxford housewife'2014 has been declared the International Year of Crystallography by Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). It marks the centenary of the award of the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics to Max von Laue, swiftly followed the next year by a further Nobel Prize in Physics for the work done by father-and-son team William Henry and William Lawrence (known as Lawrence) Bragg. These two prizes were key staging points in the development of x-ray crystallography, a technique that has done so much to unravel the structure of matter at the atomic level.Exactly 50 years after the award of the prize to von Laue, Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in establishing the structures of the vitamin B12 and penicillin, also via x-ray crystallography. During those 50 years the technique had evolved a long way. Initially only metals and compounds containing just one or two types of atom – compounds such as rocksalt (table salt) – could be understood. By the time Hodgkin was working it was possible, if difficult, to analyse huge biological molecules with all their complexity of packing.Crystallography concerns the study of the regular packing of atoms and molecules in a crystal. Fellow Occam's Corner blogger Stephen Curry has posted videos (here and here) expl...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: theguardian.com Blogposts People in science Chemistry Source Type: news