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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

Today we have another episode inspired by my recent trip to England. While I was there, I kept running into references

to chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. She was in the History of Science Museum in Oxford

and the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London. And then after I got home, I realized my phone had tagged a bunch of pictures from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as being on Dorothy Hodgkin Road.

It started to seem like the universe was trying to tell me something.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin has come up on two of our previous episodes, the one on the discovery of insulin and the one on the discovery of penicillin, because she earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964 for her use of X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of important

biochemical substances, including those two by the end of her career, as well as vitamin B12.

These discoveries were a step in being able to synthesize these molecules and to find other

similar molecules that could have

the same effects on the body? A lot of important things came out of this research. This is a two-part

episode. In part one, we are going to talk about her early life and some of the really

formative moments in that early life that led her to this career in X-ray crystallography.

And then in part two, we will talk about her research and all those discoveries that she made.

Also, usually in my episodes, once someone is out of their childhood, I usually call them mostly by their last name, unless that would be confusing.

I think this is kind of a holdover from earlier style guides that were part of my career

writing and editing stuff.

During her life, though, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was really insistent that people call her Dorothy,

and I saw so many people say this

about her that I started to feel a little weirdly formal calling her Crowfoot or Hodgkin in this

...