Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of the X-ray resulted in the creation of several offshoot disciplines. One of these is X-ray crystallography, first practiced by William Henry Bragg (1862-1942) and his son, for which they were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for physics. This new scientific tool was utilized by many researchers, but none matched the insightful approach nor the success rate of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1910. The daughter of an English archaeologist, she became quickly accustomed to travel, and at an early age had visited archeological sites all over the world. She eventually went to Great Britain to attend Somerville College at Oxford. There she studied the structure of crystals, a subject that had fascinated her since high school (in fact, she began conducting mineral experiments at age ten). Graduating in 1932, she received a small research grant that enabled her to enroll in...