On August 22, 1956, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin published the complete structure of Vitamin B12 in Nature. It was the largest structure ever solved by X-ray crystallography at that point — 181 atoms — and it had taken her and her team eight years.

Hodgkin was born on May 12, 1910, in Cairo. She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, at a time when women could complete all the requirements for a degree and receive only a certificate, not the degree itself. Oxford did not grant degrees to women until 1920, and Cambridge held out until 1948. She completed her doctorate at Cambridge under J.D. Bernal, who ran one of the foremost crystallography laboratories in Britain.

She returned to Oxford in 1934 and spent the next four decades there. She worked on insulin for thirty-five years — the structure that eluded her until 1969. But before insulin, there was penicillin.

In 1945, Hodgkin published the three-dimensional structure of penicillin, confirming the beta-lactam ring structure that had been theorized but not proven. The structure established that penicillin worked through a previously unknown mechanism, which enabled the development of synthetic antibiotics. The work was done during wartime, with limited equipment, and was classified by the British government until 1949.

In 1964, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances." The Daily Mail ran the headline: "Nobel Prize for British Wife." Margaret Thatcher, who had been a student of Hodgkin's at Oxford, called her a "great friend."

Hodgkin spent her later decades in anti-nuclear advocacy, traveling to China, the USSR, and Vietnam during the Cold War, chairing Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. She died in 1994.