This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

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.

This is part two of our episode on Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

Where we left off in part one, her last name was still Crowfoot.

She had just earned a first class degree in chemistry from Oxford.

If you have not heard part one, jumping in with this one means you will be missing

a lot of the formative experiences in her youth that led to her wanting to study crystals

and to becoming part of the field of x-ray crystallography, which was still in its infancy, and really

shaped her worldview. As we talked about in part one, X-ray crystallography was a field developed in the 19 teens.

Max von Lawa, William Henry Bragg, and his son William Lawrence Bragg all earned Nobel prizes

for their work using X-rays to study crystals.

Those prizes were awarded in 1914 and 1915, and William Henry Bragg's Christmas

lectures at the Royal Institution that introduced the idea of X-ray crystallography to a more

general audience took place in 1923.

These were, of course, not the only people working in the field.

The point was that this field was established in the 19-teens and 20s, and Dorothy Crowfoot graduated

from Oxford at 1932.

In such a new field, opportunities for advanced education were kind of limited.

...