Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of X-ray crystallography to reveal the three-dimensional structures of important biological molecules. By firing X-rays at crystals and decoding the patterns they scattered, she mapped the atoms of substances that had resisted all other methods.
Among her landmark achievements were the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 — a famously complex molecule — and later insulin, which took decades of painstaking work. Knowing a molecule's exact shape is the first step to understanding how it works and how to make or modify it.
She remains the only British woman to win a Nobel in the sciences, and she trained and inspired generations of crystallographers.
Why it matters: Hodgkin let chemists *see* the machinery of life atom by atom — the foundation of modern structural biology and rational drug design.
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