Question 1

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 2

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 3

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin 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 4

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

Accepted Answer

True. Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She remains the only British woman to win a Nobel in a scientific field (Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine).

Question 5

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin 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 6

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 code for the EDSAC computer, pioneering the use of electronic computers in X-ray crystallography to determine the complex B12 structure.

Question 7

True or false: Dorothy Hodgkin taught future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher chemistry at Oxford University.

Accepted Answer

True. Hodgkin was a chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford, in the 1940s when Thatcher studied there. Thatcher credited Hodgkin as an influence, and the two maintained a respectful relationship.

Question 8

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

Accepted Answer

False. Penicillin's structure was solved in 1945 using IBM punch-card tabulators, not electronic computers. The first stored-program electronic computers became available only years later. Hodgkin did use early computers like the Ferranti Mark I for later vitamin B12 work, but not for penicillin.

Dorothy Hodgkin Trivia Questions