NameDorothy CROWFOOT OM FRS , 1233
Birth1910, Egypt
Death1994
Spouses
Birth1910
Death1982
OccupationHistorian
EducationWinchester and Balliol College Oxford
Notes for Dorothy CROWFOOT OM FRS
Though diagnosed at age 24 with rheumatoid arthritis, she became one of the most skilled crystallographers of her time. In Cambridge and later at Oxford, she always chose projects that no one else thought quite possible. She ran into Ernst Chain one day, who was beaming from his recent animal trials of penicillin. It took four years, but she cracked penicillin's complex and misleading structure in 1946. That knowledge would help manufacturers create semisynthetic penicillins. Ten years later she announced the structure of vitamin B12, and in 1964 won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1969, she finally solved the puzzle of the structure of insulin.
See entry in Dictionary of National Biography