Dorothy Hodgkin Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Nobody who lived through the first year or two of the trials of penicillin in Oxford could possibly not care about what it was. But also it's difficult not to enjoy just growing the crystals.

Dorothy Hodgkin
One's tendency when one is young is to do experiments just to see what will happen, without really looking for specific things at all. I first set up a little laboratory in the attic at home just to grow crystals or try experiments described in books, such as adding a lot of concentrated sulfuric acid to the blood from a nosebleed which precipitates hemotin from the hemoglobin in the blood. That was quite a nice experiment. I still remember it.

Dorothy Hodgkin
I'm really an experimentalist...I think with my hands. I just like manipulation. I began to like it as a child and it's continued to be a pleasure.

Dorothy Hodgkin
A great advantage of X-ray analysis as a method of chemical structure analysis is its power to show some totally unexpected and surprising structure with, at the same time, complete certainty.

Dorothy Hodgkin
Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules... were just as experiments suggested?

Dorothy Hodgkin
I used to say the evening that I developed the first x-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life. But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.

Dorothy Hodgkin
Still I had a lurking question. Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules as complicated as the sterols, or strychnine were just as experiment suggested?

Dorothy Hodgkin
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, Concerning the Nature of Things.

Dorothy Hodgkin
The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Dorothy Hodgkin