Dorothy Hodgkin: a Life by Georgina Ferry, Granta, 拢20, ISBN
1862071675
HOW many 10-year-old girls have a lab of their own? Admittedly, this was only
a converted bit of an attic, but it did the trick: four decades later, in 1964,
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin picked up a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her
lifetime鈥檚 work on the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12.
Georgina Ferry鈥檚 splendid biography of Hodgkin is the first to tell her
story.
Hodgkin鈥檚 life was unusual from the start. She was born in 1910 in Cairo,
where her archaeologist father worked for the colonial education service; her
mother鈥檚 political interests extended to taking young Dorothy to the 1925
congress of the League of Nations. Living in Britain with her sisters, she
inevitably saw little of her parents, but they did find ways to encourage her
interest in science, while family friends helped to boost her education to the
standard required for Oxford. Her mother鈥檚 suffragette friend Margery Fry,
principal of Somerville College, took Dorothy under her wing, and she emerged
with both a first class degree and a scholarship for a few years of postgraduate
research.
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A chemist friend in Egypt introduced her to J. D. Bernal鈥檚 crystallography
lab in Cambridge, and Bernal hired her in 1932. Dorothy fell in love with him,
and their correspondence reveals a professional and personal intimacy that
lasted a lifetime. Bernal, a Communist, created in his lab a mix of politics,
science and personal relationships鈥攁n atmosphere in which Hodgkin thrived.
It became the model for the lab she would later create in Oxford. When she
returned to Somerville in 1934 as a fellow, research remained her forte: both
she and her students found her tutorials dreary (Ferry writes that the students
were often 鈥渦tterly lost鈥� as she talked on, completely over their heads, and
uncomfortable when she lapsed into long silences).
It was in Oxford that she met and married Fry鈥檚 cousin, Thomas Hodgkin. He
had a talent for absence, and jobs far afield meant that his wife and children
saw little of him. He spent a few years in Oxford, working in adult education,
but he would appoint only tutors who were members of the Communist Party. When
the university disapproved, he took a job in Ghana (then the Gold Coast) away
from his family once again.
Hodgkin consolidated her position in Oxford, and spent half a century there
in dogged pursuit of her molecules. She was fascinated by those vital to the
ordinary physiological processes of everyday life; many of these molecules are
defiantly complex in composition and structure. And she was among the first wave
of scientists to use physical methods to investigate them: in particular, the
new technology of X-ray crystallography enabled her to peer among the atoms. She
was a pioneer in the interpretation of the slender evidence in the scatter
patterns the X-rays left behind. As the structures began to emerge, she felt
sure she was due a Nobel prize, and became disgruntled when it went elsewhere
year after year. When the accolade finally came, she was in Ghana with Thomas.
The young country鈥檚 post-colonial successes, and the financial freedom offered
by the prize, inspired her to think again about politics.
While a welcome recruit to many causes, Hodgkin was admired more for her
scientific eminence than her political sense: her reactions to conflicts were
personal reactions to individuals, be they promising students facing poverty or
Vietnamese villagers enduring American aggression. But empathy does not, on its
own, constitute politics, and Hodgkin now appears naive within her universities
and on the world stage. It was perhaps an indication of her personal approach to
institutional politics that her Oxford lab disintegrated when she retired.
Aside from her intellectual brilliance and her empathetic nature, however,
Hodgkin鈥檚 personality is something of an enigma. In fact, during her time in
Bernal鈥檚 lab, a colleague had remarked that her most prominent characteristic
was her unobtrusiveness. The clearest insights into her personality come from
her correspondence with family and friends (her own memoirs were incomplete at
her death). And her world was populated by characters much more famous than she:
perhaps this is why she remains difficult to see. Between her family and
Thomas鈥檚, they seemed to know everyone who was anyone for most of the century.
She dined with Kitchener, Kruschev and Thatcher; she could have mustered an
international party of scientific Nobel laureates at the drop of a hat.
While her contacts sometimes put Hodgkin in the shade, her world was a vivid
one. Ferry鈥檚 account of the social and political context of the day not only
fleshes out Hodgkin鈥檚 portrait, but is also useful as a picture of an era in
which science and politics struggled to come to terms with each other. Ferry鈥檚
story of life in the lab under Bernal is magical, an echo of what it must have
been for the young Dorothy. In the lab, X-ray crystallography can be a slow and
tedious business, but Ferry gives us years of painstakingly acquired findings at
a cracking pace by teasing out the strands of Hodgkin鈥檚 later life鈥攁
particular molecule, the path to the Nobel prize鈥攁nd presenting them in
separate chapters. Be thankful: it took 40 years for a particular favourite of
Hodgkin鈥檚, insulin, to crack under her team鈥檚 determined gaze. Despite the
narrative oddities produced by these parallel stories (people die in one
chapter, but live in the next), this fast-forwarding results in a compelling
read.
Ferry鈥檚 laudable attention to the historical context of her subject also
reveals how many women worked alongside Hodgkin, making useful contributions in
uncelebrated roles, like most scientists. It鈥檚 a shame, though, that these women
appear in the index under their husbands鈥� names: in many cases the husbands came
along much later. And delicious moments, such as when colleague and Communist
activist Nora Wooster leavens the long hours in the Cambridge lab by having her
au pair pop in with a picnic, are better than fiction.
Hodgkin hated being held up as a role model for women in science. Her
distinguished connections, the flexible boundaries of a new interdisciplinary
field brimming with important problems, an influential Communist lover and
mentor, family money鈥攖his biography reveals why her experience would be
difficult to repeat, even if one did have the mind for the job. Professional
women everywhere would envy a household that boasted a domestic staff of cook,
cleaner and nanny even in lean times. Without that support and Thomas鈥檚
absences, her long hours of work and travel would surely have been
impossible.
Those who believe that women necessarily do science differently, or do a
different kind of science, will be disappointed when reading this biography.
Despite the relative freedom offered by her reputation and status, and the
funding that came to her personally rather than via a university post, her
science was of a rather ordinary kind. She worked long and hard to hone the mind
that looked at arrays of X-ray spots and saw molecules. The insight that
admirers demean as 鈥渇eminine intuition鈥� came not from the chromosomes she was
born with, but from years of slogging through patterns, numbers and charts. Like
a lot of men, she let others keep her household together, and in the lab she
displayed many of the characteristics of the stereotypical scientist, from a
lifelong obsession with particular problems to a distaste for paperwork, an
uninspiring wardrobe and a fiendishly untidy desk.
Hodgkin鈥檚 quietly successful life deserves this fine biography: Ferry has
brilliantly captured the flavour of a century of science, a century in which her
subject鈥檚 sometimes dim outline moved slowly but surely through an extraordinary
life, towards goals we can all be glad she reached.