Question 1

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin discovered the structure of insulin entirely on her own without any collaborators.

Accepted Answer

False. Hodgkin led a large team over decades. The insulin structure was solved with many collaborators, including her graduate students and colleagues at Oxford and other institutions.

Question 2

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin never married and had no children, devoting her life entirely to science.

Accepted Answer

False. She married historian Thomas Hodgkin in 1937 and had three children. She balanced family life with her demanding research, often working from home while raising kids.

Question 3

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin is the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in a scientific field.

Accepted Answer

False. Other British women like Rosalind Franklin didn't win, but Gertrude Elion (American) and others have won. Actually, multiple British women have won science Nobel Prizes, including Frances Arnold.

Question 4

True or false: She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for determining structures of penicillin and vitamin B12.

Accepted Answer

True. The Nobel Prize citation specifically honored her work on penicillin and vitamin B12. Insulin was solved later, in 1969, after her Nobel win.

Question 5

True or false: She was denied a professorship at Oxford because she was a woman, despite her Nobel Prize.

Accepted Answer

False. She was appointed a professor at Oxford in 1960, four years before winning the Nobel. However, she faced earlier career obstacles due to gender bias in academia.

Question 6

True or false: Hodgkin used a computer called the 'Oxford Electronic Computer' to help solve the structure of penicillin.

Accepted Answer

True. She was an early adopter of computing for crystallography. She used a Ferranti Mark I computer at Oxford to perform complex calculations for her penicillin model.

Question 7

True or false: Hodgkin's work on vitamin B12 was aided by early computer programs she wrote herself.

Accepted Answer

True. She taught herself programming and wrote custom Fortran programs to analyze X-ray crystallography data for the complex B12 molecule, which had over 100 atoms.

Question 8

True or false: Hodgkin was a close friend and political ally of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Accepted Answer

True. Despite being a lifelong socialist, Hodgkin respected Thatcher's chemistry background. They met at Oxford and maintained a cordial relationship, even though their politics sharply diverged.

Dorothy Hodgkin Trivia Questions