Her husband, too, was a distraction largely absent, working away from Oxford throughout most of their marriage. Though outwardly chaotic, her laboratory became a congenial place to work. Thankfully her mother was reassuring, and ready with a disguising frill. A decidedly “good girl”, she remembers the trauma of having spilt concentrated nitric acid on her silk frock, in a moment snatched between church and Sunday lunch. During the dinner parties organised by her gregarious husband, Dorothy was wont to “sit quietly with a faraway look in her eyes, her mind on the latest structure problem”.The product of unusual parents who were mostly absent, pursuing amateur archaeological interests in the Middle East, Dorothy, nee Crowfoot, spent great chunks of her childhood either looking after her younger sisters or absorbed in chemical experiments in her attic laboratory.
Dorothy always reckoned that her first step towards this goal – her first fuzzy X-ray of an insulin crystal in 1935 – was probably the most exciting moment of her life.There is little that is psychologically probing here, but perhaps that is the point; perhaps Dorothy was most herself when she was immersed in her data, mentally conjuring up a molecule in three dimensions. Indeed, we are not told until the very end that Dorothy’s beloved husband had repeated affairs throughout their marriage, culminating in a long-lasting and open liaison with his first love. Adopting a style that Dorothy would have favoured, Ferry gives pride of place to the science, explaining step by step the scientific challenges confronting Dorothy and how she overcame them.Her last conquest was the insulin molecule, finally described down to the last atom when Dorothy was 78. Ferry reveals that Dorothy, long believed to be one of the few exceptions, also had a love affair with Bernal, who supervised her doctoral work in Cambridge. With apparent reluctance, she broke off the relationship when she moved back to Oxford and met her husband-to-be, Thomas Hodgkin, but Bernal remained a lifelong friend and source of intellectual support.But Ferry does not dwell on Dorothy’s private life. “Self-promotion was not part of her nature.”She survived from sheer merit, but only perhaps because she also had powerful allies, including the charismatic J D Bernal, famed for his science, his Marxism, and his sexual liaisons with female colleagues. She welcomed into her laboratory virtually anyone who wanted to work with her -Margaret Thatcher was briefly a student – and subsequently gave everyone full credit for their contributions.
Yet she wore her fame lightly: throughout her long and prolific research career, she insisted that even the most junior of her colleagues call her simply Dorothy. A leading X-ray crystallographer, she helped to solve the structure of large, complex and biologically important molecules including penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. All the same, there was something about the way she did science that was distinctly unusual.As a pioneering female Fellow of the Royal Society, and the only British woman to win a Nobel Prize, her stature as one of this country’s pre-eminent scientists is secure. DOROTHY HODGKIN: A LIFE
BY GEORGINA FERRY, GRANTA, pounds 20
THE REMARKABLE life of Dorothy Hodgkin – who died in 1994, aged 85 – suggests that there is, after all,”another way” to do science Not that Dorothy would have welcomed the notion.
She vehemently rejected any suggestion that her gender was an obstacle to her progress, says Georgina Ferry, and had a horror of the term “role model”. Look at that sports field, hear those church bells ring again, savour those wild flowers, delight in that masterpiece, sit comfortably in that new auditorium… the list is endless.If I ran the Lottery I’d take the Albert Hall once a year and stage a gigantic spectacle in celebration of what annually has been achieved. That would give us back some of the national pride which seems so signally these days to be missing So, yes, three cheers for the Lottery!. Indeed, much of what it does achieve will be of little or no interest to the majority of ticket-buyers,But I embarked on this lottery quest sceptical and leave it impressed, in particular by the thousands of projects all over the country, many very humble, which would never have happened but for those funds. Readers of their local paper know just that.But at the same time, the Lottery money for “good causes” has been a public relations disaster.
Our image is of Mystic Meg in a cloud of smoke and a shallow, sequinned show. I have no objection to that but it undersells and distorts what we ought to be celebrating as a corporate national achievement across the country There’s not an area that’s not benefited. The Arts Council pays pounds 250 a day, others pounds 500.There is also some embarrassment that this is a voluntary tax which in fact milks the poorest sections of society. I for one have never purchased a lottery ticket but I have certainly benefited from what its proceeds have done. They are the army of architects, designers, surveyors and accountants who have reaped a fortune in consultancy fees both from the Lottery organisations and from the luckless institutions who have often bled themselves financially while putting schemes together for submission. Now the ability to raise money and work the financial labyrinth are the prime sought-after attributes and the only expanding staff areas are those dedicated to sponsorship and fund-raising.Looking back over the last four years there are those who have done extremely well on the pickings.