Dorothy Hodgkin – Ada Lovelace Day 2010

This Ada Lovelace Day I'd like to tell you about Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. As the BBC put it, she was 'responsible for crucial developments in the techniques of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of complex organic molecules'.

She's inspiring because she was a brilliant scientist – a Nobel prizewinner for chemistry and an early woman fellow of the Royal Society – and because she was committed to hold scientists responsible for the technological and ethical changes their research created.

I'm neck-deep in assignments and work this week, so this is a very brief entry! The BBC and Wikipedia links can explain her work better than I can anyway.

[Update: I was so busy I didn't look at the time, but it turns out the Science Museum has Dorothy Hodgkin's model of pig insulin. I'm now inspired to see how many of the Royal Society's 'Most influential British women in the history of science' we can link to our collections and write about on our collections blog. If you haven't come across the blog before then I'd recommend it – I know I'm biased but the posts our curators write just keep getting better.]