So she worked on it incrementally across decades, returning to it periodically, waiting for mathematics and technology to develop the capacity to match her ambition. When computers became powerful enough to assist with calculations that had previously consumed years of human effort, Dorothy — now in her fifties — returned to insulin with full determination.
In 1969, she published the complete structure.
Thirty-five years from the first attempt. Done while her body deteriorated around her. Done while the arthritis that had threatened her career at twenty-four had spent three and a half decades trying to make good on that threat. Done with hands that, by 1969, barely functioned.
The insulin structure transformed diabetes research. Understanding precisely how the molecule was arranged allowed scientists to develop synthetic versions, to create better and more reliable treatments, to approach the disease with tools that hadn’t existed before. The people alive today because of treatments enabled by that knowledge number in the millions.
In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the third woman in history to receive it, and only the second after Marie Curie to receive it as the sole winner. The Nobel committee honored her for, as they put it, her “determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances.” They did not mention what she had done those structures with.
Dorothy continued working into her seventies. When the arthritis eventually confined her to a wheelchair, she supervised research from it. When her hands became so impaired she could barely grip a pen, she mentored students and contributed to science through collaboration and correspondence. She maintained scientific relationships with researchers in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, when doing so carried real professional and political risk. She spoke out against nuclear weapons.
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