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To promote a wider interest in the science of geology through
organised lectures, field excursions and social activities.
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Dorothy Hodgkin - A
Life
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| In 1970
Dorothy Hodgkin became Chancellor of Bristol University. Sixteen years
earlier she became the only British woman to win a Nobel Prize.
Although the award was given as a Chemistry Prize her life's work was
centred on using the then newly developing science of X-ray
Crystallography to resolve the structures of Penicillin and Vitamin
B12. Dorothy toured around the Middle East as a child with her parents
who were archaeologists and she became fascinated by the mosaic
patterns she saw endlessly repeating on the walls of temples. Once
back in England, in spite of her disrupted education, she took a
Chemistry Degree at Oxford and also managed in spare moments to
explore more patterns. This time it was the relationships of faces and
angles of crystals, learning how to measure and record three
dimensional objects on to paper. The X-ray link arose really by chance from work being done in Germany by Max von Laue around 1912 as he tried to solve the mystery of the newly discovered X-rays as no one knew whether they were particles or waves. They were projected through copper sulphate crystals to act as a fine diffraction grating for the very short wavelengths involved. The atoms in the crystal lattice produced repeating patterns on the plates and also gave the spots different densities. Laurence Bragg devised a formulae for relating the intensity of the spots to the wavelength of the X-rays and the positions of the atoms in the crystals. Dorothy was to start and develop these techniques and then later to teach many others to apply these methods to resolve the very complex structures of organic structures such as proteins and penicillin. The whole story of how the work and the equipment used evolved together often in very difficult cramped corners in borrowed corners of other peoples laboratories is fascinating. Getting suitable crystals to form and stay stable long enough to work on was one problem and finding the right heavier atoms to dope the crystals and act as markers to help map out the 3D structure took time.
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