Dorothy Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12.
Hodgkin pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction to map the arrangement of atoms in complex biological molecules. Her work on penicillin helped reveal the antibiotic’s three-dimensional structure, while her much larger vitamin B12 project eventually produced a detailed molecular model.
She also solved the structure of insulin, although that work took many years because insulin is a particularly large and complicated protein. Hodgkin received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her determinations of important biochemical substances by X-ray techniques.
Hodgkin is sometimes confused with Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images were crucial to DNA research. Both scientists made major contributions to structural biology, but Hodgkin’s Nobel citation specifically recognized penicillin, vitamin B12, and related chemical structures.