On Memorialising Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Memorial

There have been lots of arguments about memorials in the last few years. Campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall have developed around a specific statue in Oxford, for example, and the statue of Colston in Bristol being torn down was an event which sparked national discussions about the legacy of slavery in modern Britain. It is fair to say that the arguments about statues have become part of the ‘culture wars’: symbolic conflicts over the values our society holds.

In general, though, memorials are often uncontroversial. We might hold a minute’s silence on Remembrance Day to reflect on the horrors of war. We might commission a blue plaque to celebrate artistic work which we feel wasn’t properly recognised at the time. Broadly, memorialising might be seen as an act of conversation between the present and the past. It’s not just about yesterday, and it’s not just about today: a memorial is an object which represents the past to the present.

I’d like to use this blog post to discuss the case for memorialising Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in the Oxford Chemistry Department. To do this I’m going to look at three perspectives: her scientific accomplishments, existing memorials, and current ambitions.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

It is well worth reading Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Wikipedia article if you are interested in biographical detail. Somerville College has also produced a brief and lively biography.

Her most famous scientific accolade is her citation for the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the use of X-Ray crystallography to determine the structures of molecules. Her most significant contributions were the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin. This work was extraordinarily challenging given the computational demands of structure determination, but it also exemplifies pure science doing useful work for society. It is a social good for scientists to know about the structure of insulin, though it was a technical challenge to solve the structure for a molecule with so many atoms. 

On any measure, these structures were enormous scientific achievements. But they are given further prominence by the rarity of a woman winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I believe that to date Crowfoot Hodgkin is the only British woman to win this prize; she was certainly the first.

Gender was an important thread running through elements of her non-research relationship with Oxford. Her undergraduate degree was at Somerville College, an all-women institution where she was the third person to graduate with a first-class degree. Later, she was appointed as the first Fellow and Tutor in Chemistry at the same college (where she taught Margaret Thatcher, the country’s first female Prime Minister). Crowfoot Hodgkin seems to have been the first person at Oxford to be given paid maternity leave, and she used some of the Nobel Prize money to help set up a nursery in Somerville College.

Current Memorials in Oxford

Crowfoot Hodgkin is memorialised in two ways that I am aware of within the Chemistry Department. There is a blue plaque on the front of the Inorganic Chemistry Labs facing South Parks Road, and a beautiful but easy-to-miss brass plaque from the ACS near the Inorganic Chemistry Lecture Theatre.

A blue plaque from the Royal society of Chemistry celebrating Crowfoot Hodgkin’s crystallographic work in Oxford’s Inorganic Chemistry Labs.

A brass plaque from the American Chemistry Society celebrating one of Crowfoot Hodgkin’s papers, showing the crystal structure of penicillin.

The Biochemistry Department has named its new building after Crowfoot Hodgkin. Somerville College also has a building named after her, and hosts an annual Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture.

EDIT 31March2023: the Oxford Natural History Museum has a bust of Crowfoot Hodgkin.

Within the Chemistry department, where Crowfoot Hodgkin worked, there are rooms named after donors and academics but currently - to my knowledge - nothing named after her. Several rooms do not have names, and one of these is the Inorganic Lecture Theatre.

Current Ambitions

Crowfoot Hodgkin did extraordinary science at a time when there were very few women in the field. Winning a Nobel Prize is a rare thing, but her legacy also speaks to themes of inclusion which are still very timely. There are good arguments for memorialising Crowfoot Hodgkin on the basis of both scientific merit and her Oxford-internal successes around structural exclusion (like maternity leave and nursery places).

Would this develop a useful conversation between past and present? I think it probably would. Doing great scientific work in a socially-inclusive environment is a story which we need to keep telling, and that story would resonate differently in the Crowfoot Hodgkin Meeting Room or the Crowfoot Hodgkin Lecture Theatre. Perhaps this is the line of reasoning which led to the Biochemistry department naming a new building after her.

Memorial needn’t be just in physical objects, and memorialising Crowfoot Hodgkin in the undergraduate syllabus would also be possible. Her contribution to the discipline was marvellous, and it should be celebrated more loudly even if the technical complexity of her work sits outside the bounds of a traditional syllabus (specifically, a syllabus which centres PXRD but not single-crystal XRD). 

Some concrete examples of syllabus opportunities might make this idea clearer. Penicillin is mentioned in several organic lectures - could we mention Crowfoot Hodgkin alongside the stereochemistry of the 4-member ring? B12 is an important bioinorganic molecule - could we talk about how its structure was solved in this very building? Or is there scope to give an aside in the PXRD lectures about how single-crystal work on, say, penicillin is harder than indexing the FCC NaCl from powder experiments? I’ve never done structural refinement of single-crystal XRD data personally, but it might even be that this is something which could form some kind of extended lab practical if it sat alongside training in the relevant techniques.

Conclusion

There are good reasons to consider naming something meaningful after Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in the department where she was the first British woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the first woman in the University to take paid maternity leave. These are the kinds of contributions which staff, students, and donors could unite around in celebration.

In an institution which places great value on both its history and its future, perhaps choosing to memorialise such an astonishing figure is one way of having a more constructive conversation about the barriers Oxford sometimes places in front of women who want to succeed here. The under-awarding of first-class degrees to undergraduate women, for example, has persisted from Crowfoot Hodgkin’s time to ours.

It’s easy to over-state how much of a difference names have (do students sitting in the Bodleian library know who it’s named after, or literally anything about Sir Thomas Bodley?), but the symbolism of memorialising can be meaningful in itself if it sits within a broader programme. If - say - the Inorganic Lecture Theatre were renamed, I hope it would be done alongside some kind of high-quality display about Crowfoot Hodgkin and her accomplishments. I also hope it would be some part of a much wider conversation about the kind of concrete actions a modern department could take on matters of inclusivity and representation.