Читать книгу The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age - James Naughtie, James Naughtie - Страница 27

When Dorothy Hodgkin went up to Oxford University to read chemistry in 1928 she was in a band of pioneers. Not until 1920 had women been admitted as students with the same status as men, and she was one of the early trailblazers. That liberation produced a career in science that took her to the top: to the Royal Society’s most celebrated award, to a Nobel Prize, and allowed her to make discoveries that shaped our time.

She cracked the secrets of insulin, penicillin and many proteins in a way that allowed scientists to leap forward. It produced medical advance, research in hitherto closed areas of chemistry, and consequently established whole new areas of study in biology. It was she who showed that understanding how molecules were built could unlock the mysteries of their biological functions. In deciphering the structure of molecules she drew a map: for many scientists it was possible for the first time to see where they were going. One of her admiring colleagues who watched her work over many decades said: ‘She was one of these masters whose method of work is as exciting and beautiful to follow as the results that flow from it.’ Hodgkin herself summed it up like this: ‘I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.’

She was also the tutor who introduced the student Margaret Roberts to the chemistry lab and who, forty years on, would argue with that former student, now Margaret Thatcher – politely but resolutely – about her view of the world. With her privileged access to the only British Prime Minister to have a science degree, Hodgkin thought that she could make a rational case for better relations across the Iron Curtain, which was always one of her fervent hopes. She believed that Western scientists should help their Russian and Chinese counterparts, cut off from so much for so long, and never regretted that in the tumult of the sixties she had chosen, as a scientist, to campaign for nuclear disarmament.

Mrs Thatcher told her how much she valued her advice – though politically they were of vividly different political stripes – and she hung a portrait of Hodgkin in her study at Number 10, a striking acknowledgement of her encounter with a formidable intellect. Some in Oxford noticed that on her groundbreaking visit to see Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1987 the Prime Minister included in her itinerary the Institute of Crystallography, where Hodgkin was a valued friend.

Hodgkin’s impact on science can be traced back to the work she started in a small basement room in the corner of the university library in Oxford in the mid-thirties. After graduation as Dorothy Crowfoot – men outnumbered women students in the faculty by twelve to one – she’d gone to Cambridge for her doctorate and returned to a fellowship at Somerville College, with which she would be associated for the rest of her life. She set up X-ray equipment in that small shared laboratory, and published her first serious paper, under her name alone, in 1935. It had the simple and startling title ‘X-ray single photographs of insulin’: a lifetime of discovery in crystallography had begun. In the next decade her work on the structure of penicillin was published under her married name. She had met her husband, Thomas, in the thirties and – a little reluctantly, it seems – accepted the social convention that from then on she’d be the chemist Hodgkin.

Her method was X-ray crystallography, which allowed you to take a picture of how the atoms fitted together in the molecule. Her work on penicillin was a revelation because it had proved impervious to that kind of examination in the past: to put it simply, no one knew exactly how penicillin worked. Once you had a picture of it, you knew. The most important discoveries were made during the war and kept secret. Afterwards manufacturers had an interest in maintaining that secrecy for commercial advantage, so it was only in 1949 that, with others, Hodgkin could finally publish her research. It was a time of great excitement because the potential power of the computer was beginning to be understood, and the possibilities of her work were being transformed. By the mid-fifties she had unravelled the complexities of a molecule of vitamin B12, which had long baffled her peers. For a chemist, one of her admiring colleagues said, it was like breaking the sound barrier.

Hodgkin was a woman of striking appearance. She had fair hair and blue eyes and was fond of wearing handmade clothes, in defiance of any fashion that might be around, cutting a notable figure in Oxford. And politically she was fiery. Early on in the thirties, encouraged by her mother to lean to the left, she developed political commitments that she never abandoned. When she was reaching the most productive phase of her life as a chemist, during the fifties, this caused her considerable difficulty. She was a socialist; her husband Thomas was closely associated with the Communist Party and in those days that was a taint that was hard to erase. The State Department in Washington declared her ‘statutorily inadmissible’ to the United States in 1953, citing her membership of Science for Peace, a body it regarded as little more than a Communist front. At that time, with Senator Joseph McCarthy whipping up alarm about the influence of Communists in American institutions of all kinds, it was very hard for her to overcome the obstacle: academic distinction was not enough. It took her four years – and McCarthy’s disgrace and fall from influence – to have that ban waived, but throughout her life she still had to seek special permission each time she visited the United States on academic business.

At home, her alarm about nuclear weapons led her to become one of the most influential scientists attached to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. CND came about as a consequence of an article in the New Statesman in 1957 by the writer J.B. Priestley, and by the following Easter it had enough support to organize a four-day march to the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston. The protest was led by a colourful assortment of public figures, among them the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, the writer and Labour figure Michael Foot and the historian A.J.P. Taylor. Hodgkin was one of CND’s first supporters and one of those who, because of her scientific credentials, lent the movement a weight that it would not otherwise have had.

Into the early sixties, the Aldermaston marches at Easter were public events of considerable significance and captured a great deal of attention – although CND had undergone internal splits and Canon Collins resigned the chairmanship – and even after its influence waned quite fast Hodgkin continued throughout that decade to support political campaigns – for example, against American military involvement in Vietnam. She also went on visiting the Soviet Union and China, at a time when contacts were much more difficult than scientists of a later generation could imagine. The fact that one of the reasons she was welcomed so warmly was because of her criticism of the West didn’t bother her at all: she wanted to talk to fellow chemists. Until the darkness of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution descended and China was cut off from the outside world for years, she was one of the scientists who travelled there regularly from the West, and she was able to report on the progress made by Chinese researchers into insulin, in parallel with her own research. In the last year of her life, 1993, although frail she defied her doctors to attend one last conference in Beijing.

She was criticized for allowing her convictions about scientific cooperation to cause her to ignore the suppression of individual freedom – in the Soviet Union, for example – but she remained determined to pursue her contacts however often she might be accused of being politically naïve. In 1987, in old age, she was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, in the last days of the Soviet Union – and regretted none of her political activity.

All through the sixties she had pushed back the barriers in her chosen field of research. Work in Cambridge demonstrated that protein molecules could indeed be subject to X-ray crystallography and she and her group continued to work on insulin, the subject of her first investigations in the thirties. By 1969 she was able to bring that work to a triumphant conclusion and reveal insulin’s whole molecular structure.

The accounts of the climax of that research catch something of the excitement that seemed to well up in every lab where Hodgkin worked. She and her colleagues spent a weekend building a model of the molecule. Suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis, she was wearing slippers because of her swollen ankles, but like the rest she laboured through the night to complete the model. When it was unveiled a few weeks later it was the product of half a lifetime’s work. She put it like this: ‘I used to say that the evening I developed the first X-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.’

From accounts by her colleagues a picture emerges of a passionate and warm woman – her students knew her as ‘Dorothy’ and nothing else – who was able to inspire them with the excitements of science. Despite the pain she often suffered she had great dexterity in the lab and she loved the practical business of devising experiments and seeing them through, each one a journey of discovery. Her work on vitamin B12 brought her the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964 – she was the first woman scientist to have won it since Marie Curie in 1911 – and in the seventies the Royal Society honoured her with its most important award, the Copley Medal. Although she told friends that honours didn’t interest her she did accept membership of the Order of Merit in 1965 (on the same day as Benjamin Britten), the first woman to be celebrated in this way since Florence Nightingale.

In her later years Hodgkin had the satisfaction of watching rapid medical advances that owed a great deal to her work in unlocking the structure of molecules, giving biologists the information they needed to understand much that had been impenetrable. And she never lost her appetite for discovery. She once said that ‘there are two moments that are important. There’s the moment when you know that you can find out the answer and that’s the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you’ve got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy.’

She had an intriguing hobby. She was born in Cairo (in 1910) and her parents later moved to Sudan. So it was maybe not surprising that she developed an early interest in ancient artefacts and archaeology – as a student she combined archaeology and chemistry until she decided to specialize. And all her life she retained and interest in ancient mosaics in particular – as if they were human creations that matched in their beauty some of the miracles of nature that fascinated her all her days.