★★★★☆ A truly delightful person

Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life

Georgina Ferry

I picked up this book because I had just read Bonnie Garmus' novel Lessons in Chemistry, about fictional chemist Elizabeth Zott and the difficulties she faces as a woman and a chemist in the late 1950s. Because I have read other books by and about female scientists, I suspected that the picture presented in Lessons in Chemistry was not accurate. (To be completely clear -- women in science did and still do face obstacles and unfairness -- anyone who denies it is ignorant or attempting to deceive. But Garmus gets most of it wrong.)

Dorothy Hodgkin was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. In Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Georgina Ferry writes that Dorothy herself had little patience with the idea that she was disadvantaged as a woman.

She vehemently rejected any suggestion that her gender was an obstacle to her progress. For the most part her life story bears this out, and I have tried to show what factors enabled her not only to achieve, but to be recognized for her achievements, at a time when women were not generally expected to have careers.

(By the way, Dorothy insisted on being called "Dorothy" by everyone she met. Ferry thus calls her simply "Dorothy" throughout Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and I will do the same in this review.)

There is a balancing act going on here. Both Dorothy and Ferry are clearly aware of the disadvantages under which women in science labored. Dorothy herself went to bat for her women students on multiple occasions. Ferry is careful to lay out the facts of overt discrimination -- for instance, the stupid rules that governed women at Oxford, which Dorothy had to struggle with. Even after winning the Nobel Prize, Dorothy had no official status at Oxford, and this certainly was not unrelated to her gender.

But that is not really the best reason to read Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. You should read it because Dorothy is a thoroughly delightful person -- fearsomely intelligent and determined, yet the soul of modesty and kindness. If Dorothy suffered little disadvantage because of her gender, it is because she was so incredibly good at what she did. At the time of her receipt of the Nobel Prize she was almost certainly the World's greatest crystallographer. (Also, perhaps in part because of Dorothy, crystallography became something of a haven for women in science.)

What is crystallography? You would naturally guess that it is the study of crystals, and you would not be wrong. However, thanks in large part to Dorothy and her first mentor, JD Bernal, it was recognized in the 20th century that by studying the diffraction of X-rays from crystals, one could determine the three-dimensional structure of the molecules of which the crystal was made. Working with Bernal Dorothy solved the structures of several steroid molecules. Then, when on her own, she worked out the structures of Vitamin B12 and insulin, as well as many other molecules. By the 1960s her group had probably solved more structures than anyone else on Earth.

The first problem a reader faces with Ferry's biography is that crystallography is a highly technical subject, and I fear readers who don't already understand it might have trouble following Dorothy's life story. (If you want to learn more about crystallography, Gale Rhodes' Crystallography Made Crystal Clear is a very readable introduction, full of pictures.) Ferry, strangely, includes few pictures. There is one picture of a diffraction pattern from an insulin crystal, but no structures. Making molecular structures known to the world was Dorothy's life for several decades, and it seems peculiar to me that Ferry includes none.

Dorothy's life changed after the receipt of the Nobel Prize. She became less involved in the scientific work of her lab and more in what might be called scientific diplomacy. Dorothy had always been a traveler and welcoming to scientists from all nations. In the last decades of her life she became active in trying to promote world peace, one person at a time. Because she knew and was revered by everyone, from the USA to England to Russia to India to China, she could bring people together. I personally found this part of her story less interesting than the science, but of course to many readers it will be the opposite.

In conclusion, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin is a good book because Dorothy herself was such a fascinating person. Ferry is a competent biographer, and she's telling the story of a very well-documented life.

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