Penicillin had been discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928, but nobody knew exactly how it worked at the molecular level, which made it difficult to manufacture efficiently and impossible to improve. During the Second World War, the drug was desperately needed — infections that had killed soldiers throughout all of human military history could now theoretically be stopped, but production was slow and yields were inconsistent.
Understanding the molecule’s structure was the key to changing that.
Dorothy spent years coaxing penicillin crystals to give up their secrets. The molecule was more complex than anything crystallography had previously attempted. Colleagues said it couldn’t be done — too many atoms, too intricate an arrangement. Dorothy mapped every atom anyway, revealing the twisted beta-lactam ring at the structure’s heart that gave penicillin its antimicrobial power. That knowledge allowed chemists to synthesize the drug more efficiently, to modify it, to eventually create an entire family of antibiotics derived from it.
Penicillin moved from scarce miracle to mass-produced medicine. The number of lives saved since is incalculable.
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