Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structures of important biochemical substances using X-ray techniques.
Hodgkin advanced protein and small-molecule crystallography, a method that uses diffraction patterns from crystals to infer the positions of atoms. Her major structural determinations included penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin.
Her 1945 analysis of penicillin helped reveal its beta-lactam ring, while her vitamin B12 work was completed in the 1950s. Insulin required many more years of research and was reported in a detailed structure in 1969.
Hodgkin is sometimes confused with Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction work on DNA contributed important evidence for its structure but did not receive a Nobel Prize. Hodgkin remains the only British woman to have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.