صبر دوروثي هودجكن

In 1969, after thirty-four years of work, Dorothy Hodgkin and her team at Oxford finally worked out the three-dimensional structure of insulin, the hormone that people with type 1 diabetes cannot produce.

It is hard to imagine a better illustration of the quality that defined her career: a patience so deep that it could look, to outsiders, almost like stubbornness, and that was in fact a quiet form of confidence.

She was born Dorothy Crowfoot in Cairo in 1910, the daughter of British parents who worked in education and archaeology, and she spent much of her childhood in England while they remained abroad.

At the age of ten she grew her first crystals at home, and the fascination never left her.

At a time when girls were rarely encouraged to study science, she had to ask for special permission to join the boys in chemistry lessons at school, and she went on to study chemistry at Oxford before moving to Cambridge to work with the physicist John Desmond Bernal.

Her chosen method was X-ray crystallography, a technique every bit as demanding as its name suggests.

When a beam of X-rays passes through a crystal, the regularly arranged atoms inside scatter it into a pattern of spots on photographic film.

The positions and strengths of those spots contain, in coded form, information about where every atom sits, but decoding them requires an enormous amount of calculation, and in the 1930s and 1940s nearly all of it was done by hand.

For a small molecule this was hard.

For the large molecules of living things, it was widely thought to be impossible.

Hodgkin chose to work on precisely those molecules.

During the Second World War she determined the structure of penicillin at a time when chemists were still arguing about how its atoms were joined, and some refused at first to believe her result.

One chemist is said to have declared that if her structure was right, he would give up chemistry and grow mushrooms.

It was right.

In the 1950s she solved the structure of a vitamin that the body needs to make healthy blood, a molecule several times larger, and she was among the first scientists to use an electronic computer for the calculations.

The work brought her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964; she was only the third woman to receive it, after Marie Curie and Curie's daughter Irène.

One British newspaper is said to have greeted the news with a headline describing her as an Oxford housewife, which tells us rather more about the newspaper than about her.

A year later she became the second woman, after Florence Nightingale, to be appointed to the Order of Merit, one of Britain's highest honors.

What makes these achievements more remarkable still is that she accomplished most of them in pain.

At the age of twenty-four she developed rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that gradually swelled and twisted the joints of her hands and feet.

In later life she could barely hold a pen, yet she kept working, adapting her methods to her hands rather than giving up the work she loved, and colleagues rarely heard her complain.

Patience of this kind can easily become solitary, but hers was not.

Hodgkin's laboratory was known for its warmth and its lack of hierarchy.

She was simply “Dorothy” to everyone, from senior researchers to first-year students, and she had a reputation for giving credit generously and for taking the ideas of young scientists as seriously as those of famous ones.

Many of the people she trained went on to lead laboratories of their own around the world, and several later described her less as a supervisor than as a model of how science should be done: carefully, collaboratively and without fuss.

Her approach was also, in its understated way, a form of courage.

Choosing a problem that may take decades to solve means accepting that you might fail in public, or simply run out of time.

When she took her first X-ray photograph of insulin in 1935, she was so excited, the story goes, that she wandered the streets of Oxford that night, only to wake the next morning wondering how far the photograph really was from an answer.

The honest reply was more than three decades, many generations of students and computers vastly more powerful than the ones she had started with.

Dorothy Hodgkin died in 1994.

The structures she revealed now appear in textbooks as if they had always been known, which is perhaps the strangest fate a scientific achievement can have: to become so obvious that nobody remembers it was once thought impossible.