The third molecule was insulin, and it would take thirty-five years.
Dorothy began studying insulin in 1934 — the same year her arthritis was diagnosed. The molecule was massive by crystallography standards, nearly 800 atoms, and the computational tools available in the 1930s were nowhere near sufficient to decode it. 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.
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