Name: The exceptional life of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-10-14T17:40:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

...should be much better known than she is.

Scientists admire the great determination and skill

which has always been the mark of your work.

She was a highly intelligent, highly focused scientist.

She would keep going, whatever the difficulties.

and eventually the whole problem will crack.

Involving what can only be described as gifted intuition.

She was a peace lover. She believed in solving problems

In recognition of your services to science...

She's the only British woman scientist ever to have won

What was it about Dorothy that made is possible

at a time when so few women had those opportunities?

her father was very interested in archaeology

If there was a dig, archaeological dig, she would try and join in.

and her notebooks show that, from when she was really quite young.

She had to worry about whether there was enough money in the bank account.

started when she was only about the age of 10,

when she went to a little tiny primary school

and she said herself, "I was captured for life

one of the discoverers of x-ray crystallography

that allows you to see where the atoms are in the molecule

and so she read about being able to see atoms

and said to herself there and then, "That's what I want to do."

and yet at the end, Dorothy would ask the most piercing question.

What personal qualities have helped you in the work?

In some ways, I suppose, a certain kind of foolhardiness

that other people don't expect is quite possible to do.

I think a lot of girls grow up with a sense

that they don't have the permission to do things they might want to do.

One of the characteristics that Dorothy's upbringing gave her

she was asked to stand down from her fellowship at college.

and she also managed to be awarded maternity leave.

She was the first woman to have that at the University of Oxford.

who wanted to have a fulfilled scientific life

she suffered an attack of acute rheumatoid arthritis

and left her with distorted hands and feet.

As she got older, the arthritis did recur

Dorothy was very much engaged in international issues

and so she was vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam

She did travel extensively and she made a point of visiting,

first of all, the Soviet Union, and subsequently China.

It was the height of the Cold War, but scientific relations continued

and she was always very keen to make contact.

Internationalism was a very big part of her make-up.

The determination of the structure of vitamin B12

All the problems that Dorothy chose to work on

to a better understanding of the body in health and disease.

Penicillin. The knowledge of its structure was enormously important

Its structure was not understood until she solved it.

It enabled doctors to use materials that had been synthesised

in a laboratory and apply those to the sick patients.

The way in which those drugs are made now

rely a lot on the structure that Dorothy determined.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The exceptional life of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin | BBC Ideas

eventually

extremely

engage

technique