Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin’s Crystalline Chemistry, Part 1 About this episode Dorothy Hodgkin's career in X-ray crystallography impacted a lot of science in the 10th century. Part one of her story covers her early life and formative experiences that led her to her field of research.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:33 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Today, we have another episode inspired by my recent trip to England. While I was there, I kept running into references to chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. She was in the History of Science Museum in Oxford and the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London. And then after I got home, I realized my phone had tagged a bunch of pictures from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum as being on Dorothy Hodgkin Road. It started to seem like the universe was trying to tell me something.
2:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin has come up on two of our previous episodes, the one on the discovery of insulin and the one on the discovery of penicillin, because she earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her use of X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of important biochemical substances, including those too by the end of her career, as well as vitamin B12. These discoveries were a step in being able to synthesize these molecules and to find other similar molecules that could have the same effects on the body. Lot of important things came out of this research. This is a two-part episode. In
3:36 Tracy V. Wilson? part one, we are going to talk about her early life and some of the really formative moments in that early life that led her to this career in X-ray crystallography. And then in part two, we will talk about her research and all those discoveries that she made. Also, usually in my episodes, once someone is out of their childhood, I usually call them mostly by their last name, unless that would be confusing. I think this is kind of a holdover from earlier style guides that were part of my career.
4:08 Holly Frey? Yeah.
4:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Writing and editing stuff. Uh, during her life, though, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was really insistent that people call her Dorothy. And I saw so many people say this about her that I started to feel a little weirdly formal calling her Crowfoot or Hodgkin in this episode. She wanted to be called Dorothy and a lot of people said that.
4:30 Holly Frey? So that's mostly what we'll do. Uh, Dorothy Mae Crowfoot was the first of four daughters born to John and Grace Mary Crowfoot. Grace Mary was known as Molly. She was born on May 12th, 1910 in Cairo, Egypt. The family was living there because of John's work. Britain had established what is sometimes called a veiled protectorate over Egypt in 1882, making it nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire, but under British administration. And John worked in the Ministry of Public Instruction in both Egypt and Sudan.
5:05 Tracy V. Wilson? When Dorothy's mother Molly was growing up, she had wanted to become a doctor. And while this wasn't completely impossible in England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was really difficult. And her parents did not see the need for women to attain an education beyond finishing school. So Molly instead trained as a midwife.
5:28 Holly Frey? This training probably played a role in her marriage to Dorothy's father. Molly's attraction to John was immediate, but he didn't seem to be all that interested in her until about a decade after they first met, when she wrote to tell him she had gotten this training and was prepared for overseas service. She was particularly interested in the idea of being able to provide pregnancy care where women didn't have access to medical practitioners, or where it was considered inappropriate for women to be examined by a man or for a man to attend their births.
6:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, to kind of read between the lines, it sort of seems like he might have thought, I don't know if this person can keep up with my career that involves living and working in northern Africa and sometimes in places that don't have a lot of resources. And then she was like, I'm on board with it, actually.
6:21 Holly Frey? Bet me.
6:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
6:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Although she was denied access to a formal higher education, Molly had a lot of self-taught and experiential knowledge in subjects like art, botany, and ancient textiles. Over the course of her life, she came to be seen as an international expert in archaeological textiles in particular. She was also an advocate of educational opportunities for girls, and she helped establish schools for girls in places where John worked. All of this certainly played a role in how supportive Molly was of Dorothy's interest in becoming a scientist. The fact that Molly and John didn't have any sons may have played a part in how open they were to this as well.
7:08 Holly Frey? John and Molly's work in northern Africa meant that Dorothy and her sisters had an upbringing that was unusual for most British children, but not unheard of among the children of colonial administrators and other people working for Britain overseas. At the start of the 19-teens, Dorothy and her sisters were with their parents in northern Africa for part of the year, and then in England with grandparents during the hottest months of the summer. When World War I started in 1914, Molly took the girls, Dorothy, Joan, and Elizabeth, who was known as Betty, to England, where they lived with grandparents for the duration of the year. Molly returned to Africa and only saw them once before the
7:50 Holly Frey? war was over. She gave birth to their youngest sister Diana during the war.
7:56 Tracy V. Wilson? These separations from their parents have to have been difficult for the girls, but Dorothy also attributed her independence in her adult life to having been apart from her parents so often and for so long as a child. While being raised mostly by nurses and grandparents, she started attending school, and she became extremely determined to learn. At one point, a nurse wrote a letter to Molly about how Dorothy kept exhausting herself studying, saying, quote, "Even in her sleep, she was at school." And this was not something that Dorothy grew out of. While she was working on her fourth year project at Oxford University,
8:37 Tracy V. Wilson? a friend described her as working for almost 40 hours straight, really looking like a ghost and losing weight because she was spending so much time in the lab.
8:47 Holly Frey? After the end of World War I, when Dorothy was about eight, she and her sisters were reunited with their mother, who seems to have wanted to make up for the lost time with them. They found a home near Bechel's, close to where John had grown up. Molly taught them at home for about a year with a curriculum that she had developed herself. And that was focused on subjects like poetry, history, natural history, and geography.
9:13 Tracy V. Wilson? After that year, Dorothy and her sisters briefly attended a school that was established by the Parents National Educational Union, which was an organization to help parents establish small, private schools in people's homes or in rented rooms as an alternative to local schools. It could also help with homeschooling. The union also trained teachers to work in these schools. This very small school was where Dorothy had her first experience with chemistry in a lesson that involved growing crystals from a solution. Dorothy was 10, and she later said of this, quote, "I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals."
9:55 Holly Frey? Before long, Dorothy was putting together her own chemistry lab in her attic room at home, buying materials from the local chemist with her pocket money. Apparently, he didn't put a lot of thought into which chemicals were safe to sell to a child, and her parents trusted her not to do anything really dangerous, although her experiments did involve using a burner in the house.
10:19 Tracy V. Wilson? That was the limiting factor in the chemistry set I had growing up. I had to have parental attention to use the burner, which mostly meant not doing burner experiments.
10:33 Tracy V. Wilson? In addition to her growing fascination with science, Dorothy loved to draw and paint. As she got older, she continued to do this as a hobby, and it also became an important part of her work in crystallography. Biographer Georgina Ferry described Dorothy as "approaching the work of a scientist with the soul of an artist."
10:54 Holly Frey? When she was 11, Dorothy started attending Sir John Lehman School in Beckles. That was a coeducational school, although it had separate entrances, dining halls, and playgrounds for boys and girls. There were also classes that were considered only appropriate for one gender, one of those being chemistry, which was only for boys. That doesn't seem totally surprising, given ideas about education and gender in 1920 when this was happening, but it did seem odd considering that the chemistry teacher, Chris Deely, was a woman. Eventually, Dorothy and her friend Nora were allowed to take chemistry, under the argument that they both planned to go to university and that they would need it.
11:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Deely encouraged Dorothy in her chemistry studies, and Dorothy was also getting encouragement from outside of school. When she was 12, she and her sister Joan went to visit their father in Sudan. Dorothy met her father's colleague, Dr. A.F. Joseph, who worked at the Welcome Laboratory in Khartoum. Joseph taught her about chemistry, helped her do experiments, and gave her a surveyor's kit that she could use to identify minerals.
12:05 Holly Frey? During this trip, Dorothy also started to become more aware of the effect of British colonial rule on local people. While the same things were true in Egypt when she was born, she was only about four when she was taken to England in the wake of World War I, so she didn't really remember or know what was going on there. But she started to hear about ongoing problems with poverty and disease, and uprisings against British authorities, and the suppression of those uprisings. These were often things she was hearing about rather than directly seeing, although sometimes she did see the aftermath of violent incidents while she was traveling.
12:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Molly wanted Dorothy to understand the context of the world she was living in, including these kinds of issues. Dorothy's father was a colonial administrator, but in a lot of ways, he and Molly were idealists and progressive thinkers, at least in the context of their time. For example, John helped establish schools for girls in places where that whole idea was deeply controversial. Molly established a midwifery school in Khartoum, hoping to reduce the practice of genital mutilation, also called female circumcision, by offering training to traditional birth attendants. Molly also joined the League of Nations Union, a peace organization established
13:27 Tracy V. Wilson? to support the League of Nations, and she enlisted the children in fundraising efforts, including putting on a pageant to raise money. Molly also established a Brownie Troop and then a Girl Guide Troop, which her daughters participated in. When Dorothy was 16, her mother gave her a gift that had the same kind of impact on her as that first chemistry lesson, growing crystals. And we will get to that after a sponsor break.
13:56 Speaker 04 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
14:19 Speaker 04 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
14:27 Tracy V. Wilson? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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14:43 Speaker 05 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing.
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14:53 Speaker 06 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
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16:02 Speaker 07 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. Que tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be. Breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
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17:25 Tracy V. Wilson? When Dorothy Crowfoot was a teenager, her mother gave her Sir William Henry Bragg's book, Concerning the Nature of Things, that was published in 1925. This book was a collection of Bragg's 1923 Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution. The Christmas lectures were meant to be accessible to a general audience, including young people, covering science in an engaging and understandable way. Bragg's first lectures that year were on the nature of atoms, gases and liquids, and the last three were on crystals.
18:00 Holly Frey? One of the things Bragg talked about in these lectures was the use of X-rays to study molecules, which is a very new idea. In 1914, Max Von Lawa had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the diffraction of X-rays through crystals. Basically, Von Lawa realized that if you passed an X-ray through a crystal, it created a diffraction pattern on a photographic plate, sort of like the way light passing through a screen creates a pattern of shadows. William Henry Bragg and his son, William Lawrence Bragg, built on this discovery, finding mathematical relationships between the X-rays, the crystals, and the diffraction patterns, and building an X-ray spectrometer to study these patterns.
18:45 Tracy V. Wilson? The Bragg's discoveries were possible because of the nature of crystals. The atoms of a crystal are arranged in a regular, repeating pattern. So when an X-ray passes through a crystal, the diffraction pattern that it creates correlates with the pattern of those atoms, creates dark areas that X-ray crystalographers can use to figure out the location of each atom, and then determine the physical structure of the molecule. The Bragg's early work was on the structure of several salts and relatively small molecules, and they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1915.
19:24 Holly Frey? In her own Nobel lecture, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin cited one particular passage from William Henry Bragg's Concerning the Nature of Things. That passage was, quote, "Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision over 10,000 times, and we can now see the individual atoms and molecules."
19:47 Tracy V. Wilson? But beyond this one quote, Bragg's writing about crystals in these lectures really struck her, and I personally find it really beautiful. For example, he wrote, quote, "Order and regularity are the consequence of the complete fulfillment of the attractions which the atoms or molecules exert on one another. When the structure has grown to a size which renders it visible in the microscope or even to the naked eye, the regularity is manifest in the form of the solid body. It is what we call a crystal. It is bounded by a number of plain faces, often highly polished in appearance, so that the crystal has a certain charm, due partly to glitter and sparkle, partly to perfect
20:31 Tracy V. Wilson? regularity of outline. We feel that some mystery and beauty must underlie the characteristics that please us, and indeed, that is the case. Nature is telling us how she arranges the molecules when given full opportunity." Later on, he went on to say, quote, "Through the crystal, therefore, we look down into the first structures of nature, though our eyes cannot read what is there without the use, so to speak, of strong spectacles, which are the X-ray methods."
21:04 Holly Frey? In these lectures, Bragg wrote at length about X-rays making it possible for people to see things that would otherwise be unobservable, including atoms and molecules. He also wrote about the physical structure of crystals, making it possible for people to observe things that they would not otherwise be able to see. Reading this in her mid teens, Dorothy was absolutely fascinated.
21:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Another formative event in Dorothy's life took place around the same time that she was first reading Bragg's work on X-ray crystallography. In September of 1925, when Dorothy was 15, her mother took her to the Sixth Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. The League of Nations was established in the wake of the First World War to promote international cooperation and to work toward peace through disarmament and the nonviolent resolution of international disputes. The League of Nations also promoted international cooperation in addressing issues like human trafficking, drug trafficking, the arms trade, and maintaining fair and humane working conditions,
22:11 Tracy V. Wilson? not just in the member countries, but in other countries where they had commercial or industrial relations.
22:18 Holly Frey? The Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, also called the Geneva Protocol of 1924, had been passed at the League of Nations General Assembly the previous year. It called for compulsory arbitration among member nations to settle disputes and outline procedures for how that arbitration would be handled. This protocol had received preliminary approval from the member states, but Britain ultimately had not ratified it. One of the speeches Dorothy and Molly listened to is by French delegate Joseph Paul Bonkur, who was calling for the League to save what it could of the Protocol in spite of its failing ratification.
23:00 Holly Frey? While this protocol did not come into effect, the Assembly did call for a disarmament conference that took place in September of 1926.
23:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, this is a whole protocol that was meant to try to prevent war through peaceful negotiation of international disputes. Dorothy described the atmosphere of the General Assembly in the midst of all this as a feeling of, quote, "hope struggling against a sense of doom."
23:27 Tracy V. Wilson? Even though the 1924 Geneva Protocol went unratified, Dorothy had witnessed the process of nations coming together to try to resolve their differences through dialogue rather than violence. Molly's ongoing anti-war activism was shaped in part by the loss of all four of her brothers during World War I, and Dorothy's really started to grow after attending the assembly with her. This idea that problems should be solved through dialogue was something that she would carry with her for the rest of her life.
24:00 Holly Frey? In 1927, Dorothy took the exams that were required to attain her school certificate, earning distinction in six subjects. She also earned the highest overall marks of any girl who took the exams through her local board that year, and those high marks earned her a cash prize.
24:20 Tracy V. Wilson? These high scores were not altogether surprising, considering how bright and dedicated she had already demonstrated herself to be as a student. She had earned really high marks at other times in her education. Sometimes she had been placed in classrooms with students who were a year or more older than she was. But her parents also thought formal schooling was only one of an array of educational experiences that their children should have. So Dorothy had some big gaps at her time at the Lehman School, including an entire spring term spent with her grandmother in Italy. So she got these really high scores in spite of just like not having been present for a lot of the material.
25:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Ironically, one of the subjects that she did not earn distinction in was chemistry. And earlier on in her education, she had been ranked in the bottom half of the chemistry class.
25:15 Holly Frey? Dorothy's goal at this point was to go to Oxford, and it seems to have been her father's goal for her as well. She wrote of him wanting her to be educated in the same way that a son would have been. But it really seems like nobody had really looked into the requirements for attending Oxford. Not Dorothy, not her family, and not any of her Teachers at the Lehman School. She didn't know she would need to take an entrance examination in Latin, a language that she had no familiarity with at all. She didn't know that her math and science instruction were insufficient. She needed to learn a whole other science besides chemistry, and she needed more advanced math than she had gotten.
25:59 Tracy V. Wilson? So Dorothy and her family started planning for her to take the Oxford entrance exams in March of 1928. That was when she was going to take them, not when they started planning. And so that gave her about a year to try to get ready. During that time, she learned botany from her mother and Latin from George Watson, who was headmaster of the Lehman School. The math part was a particular challenge. Dorothy had multiple people who could help her, including a former student at the Lehman School who had gone to London University. But she really struggled if she could not understand why a particular answer was the right one. Even if she knew that the answer was right, if she couldn't explain why it was right,
26:43 Tracy V. Wilson? she would get really hung up on that part of it. Her sister Elizabeth described finding Dorothy crying over her math homework because she knew that it was right, but she could not explain why. We will get to what happened when she went for her entrance exams after we pause for a sponsor break.
27:04 Speaker 07 This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. Que tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estas haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.
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28:06 Holly Frey? Transparent pricing and control over repayment get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward.
28:46 Holly Frey? Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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30:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Dorothy Crowfoot sat for her Oxford entrance exams in March of 1928, and she was interviewed at Somerville College, named for scientist and science writer Mary Somerville, who we covered on the show in 2023. Somerville College was one of the first women's colleges established at Oxford, and there were several women's colleges by the time Dorothy applied there. But Isabel Fry had encouraged Dorothy to apply at Somerville in particular. Isabel ran a school that two of Dorothy's sisters were attending, and Isabel's sister Marjorie was principal at Somerville. Beyond that personal connection, Isabel thought Dorothy had a good chance of being accepted at Somerville because very few women were applying to
31:08 Tracy V. Wilson? study science. Somerville also had the strongest academic reputation of the Oxford women's colleges. Ultimately, all of Dorothy's preparation over that year, and maybe also that connection to the principal, paid off, and she was admitted to Somerville College, Oxford, to start in the fall of 1928.
31:27 Holly Frey? Before she went, she participated in an archaeological dig in Girash in what is now Jordan, and that was cosponsored by Yale University and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Dorothy's father, John, had been appointed director of the school. He had retired from his British civil service job in Khartoum, Sudan, a couple of years previously, at the earliest age that he could retire and still receive his full pension. It had seemed like the family might be reunited in England after years of long separations because of his work in northern Africa, but then he accepted this appointment.
32:07 Tracy V. Wilson? It might seem strange for John to have accepted this job when he was really on the verge of retiring and being with his family, but he had always wanted to be an archaeologist. Before he started working at the Ministry of Education in Cairo, he had studied archaeology and he had gone on some digs, including on behalf of the British Museum. Not ignoring the fact that there's a lot of problematic stuff at the British Museum, this is more about the trust that was placed in him going on these digs. One of his earlier jobs in Northern Africa had included being acting conservator of antiquities in Sudan, but he just did not have the kind of wealth that was required
32:49 Tracy V. Wilson? to fund his own archaeological digs, that he also didn't have the kind of academic appointment that could allow him to pursue archaeology more full-time. So this directorship was basically his dream job that came along later in his life, and it was a big enough deal for him to just put off actually retiring.
33:09 Holly Frey? One of the things that Dorothy did at this dig was work on the excavation and documentation of mosaic floors dating back to the Eastern Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries. And she was really fascinated by their geometry and their repeating patterns, much like the regular patterns of the atoms in crystals, and she started drafting a reproduction of two of these mosaics at 1/10 scale. The tiles measured about a centimeter square, and she represented each of them with a dot of paint. She worked on these reproductions for about two years after leaving the dig site and eventually sent them to Yale. She also spent some of her time at this dig studying physics, using a textbook that her
33:53 Holly Frey? Oxford tutor sent to her, since the science she really needed to go along with the study of chemistry was physics, not botany.
34:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Dorothy Crowfoot was 18 when she started at Oxford. Her classmates described her as "very quiet," which had been true in her earlier education as well, but they also said that she had really interesting things to say if you could just get her to start talking. She also had some limits in how much time she had available to connect with her classmates. An education at Oxford involved a lot of independent study, and that was something that Dorothy was really well-prepared for, given how much learning she had already done on her own, and how often she'd been responsible for her younger sisters when her parents were away. She really threw herself into this independent study,
34:42 Tracy V. Wilson? especially because Oxford was not actually teaching x-ray crystallography yet. So she was having to study everything involved with that on her own. In addition to that, Somerville students were allowed to attend lectures at the other Oxford colleges. And since there weren't many scientists at Somerville, Dorothy was spending a lot of time somewhere else. She came back to her college a lot of the time, only for meals and sleep.
35:08 Holly Frey? At the same time, she participated in a lot of activities at Oxford. She worked on archaeological digs at Roman sites in the area. She was in the labor club, the Archaeological Society, and the Junior Scientific Club. Marjorie Fry also ran the Somerville Crime Club, which was focused on penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment. And Dorothy was a member of that as well.
35:33 Tracy V. Wilson? There were a lot of rules around women and their behavior at Oxford, including how and whether women were allowed to interact with men. And there were also rules that affected the very existence of the women's colleges. Their enrollment was capped. They were prohibited from expanding beyond one woman for every four men studying across all of Oxford. The women's colleges were a lot newer than the other colleges at Oxford. Those other men's colleges had large endowments a lot of the time, thanks to generations of alumni making donations to them. The women's colleges didn't have that history or that money. And then because of that one-in-four limit,
36:18 Tracy V. Wilson? they were also barred from just bringing in a lot more paying women students to try to bring in more income to the colleges. The women's colleges tend to just have less in the way of money and supplies and equipment than the men's colleges did.
36:33 Holly Frey? In 1931, Dorothy was preparing to start on her fourth year research project, which was required for graduation from Oxford. One of the centers of crystallography in Europe was Germany, and a lot of papers on physics and chemistry were being published in German. So she took a trip to Germany to both work on her German and to get some more lab experience.
36:58 Tracy V. Wilson? In spite of her interest in things like the peace movement and the League of Nations, it really does not seem like she had a clear idea of what was happening in German politics in 1931. Or if she did, she might not have taken it very seriously. This was really a pattern in her life. Sometimes it seemed like she had an overly optimistic or even naive belief in the power of international cooperation and peace through dialogue, to the point that she did not see or fully believe negative or even horrific things that were happening. I didn't put it in the outline, but in, I think, 1936, she took a trip to Spain when the Spanish Civil War was about to start. Like, this happened more than once.
37:40 Tracy V. Wilson? When she made this trip to Germany, the Nazi party was gaining support but had not yet taken control. So to a lot of people, the situation there was escalating and scary. At the same time, though, her hosts in Germany were Jewish, and Dorothy thought that they did not seem to be very worried. Although she did get some lab time on this trip, she did not do much to improve her German because her parents came through Germany on their way back to England from a trip, and they took her on a trip to visit archaeological museums in Berlin. So not as much pressure while traveling with her parents to speak a lot of German.
38:20 Holly Frey? By the time Dorothy was ready to start her fourth year project, Oxford had set up a basic crystallography lab. Before that, she had thought she might have to go to London, where the Braggs were working, and work on her project there. But Herbert Marcus Powell, known as Tiny for his small stature, had just been hired as a demonstrator at Oxford in the mineralogy department. Demonstrator was essentially a junior lecturer position. Powell had hand-blown an X-ray tube and acquired a camera, creating a very basic crystallography setup. Dorothy was Powell's first student.
38:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, when we say very basic crystallography setup, there was an interview that I saw her doing very late in her life where she described this camera as horrible. Apparently, it was very rudimentary compared to what actually would have worked really well for doing this kind of work. The two of them worked on determining the structure of dimethylphthalium halides, which were somewhat more complex than the compounds that had already been studied through X-ray crystallography. Dorothy grew the crystals and she illustrated them. Then they would bombard these crystals with X-rays. The crystals would diffract the X-rays, which would be picked up by a photographic plate.
39:39 Tracy V. Wilson? And Dorothy would also document all of this, including drawing illustrations of it and analyze the results.
39:46 Holly Frey? Figuring out how the patterns on the plate corresponded to specific atoms required trial and error, and a lot of math, which Dorothy found very difficult. She also found Powell difficult to work with. It seems she thought he was more of a micromanager than a visionary or a mentor. As she had so often done before, she worked herself to exhaustion, leading her friends to try to look after her and make sure she ate enough, rested when she was sick, and spent at least some time out of the lab.
40:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, when I say difficult math, as somebody whose math instruction ended with pre-calculus in 1993, not only did I not understand this math, I could not figure out how to explain just the basic concepts that she was using or the tools that she was using to help her do it.
40:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Math that is beyond my understanding, beyond my education, really. If I had ever been taught it, I might could explain it, but not with an education stopping with pre-calculus in 1993.
40:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, after finishing this project in 1932, Dorothy Crowfoot was awarded a first class degree in chemistry from Oxford, making her the third woman ever to earn that distinction. She also earned a scholarship that she could use toward doing further research. And the research that she conducted with Herbert Powell was published in the journal Nature that year under both of their names.
41:20 Holly Frey? And we will get into what happened next in her life after she left Oxford next time. This is a little cliffhanger today.
41:29 Tracy V. Wilson? Kind of. This is sort of a moment where her life is about to make a lot of big changes.
41:33 Holly Frey? Ba ba ba.
41:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Um, I have some listener mail. It is a listener mail correction. This email is from Scott and Scott wrote, hi, your June 1st, 2026 episode, The Literary Life of Viola Roseborough, repeats a mistaken reference removed from Wikipedia entries for My Antonia and Viola Roseborough on June 28th, 2026, based on new research described in Who's Antonia? AI Attempts to Reconceive Jim Burden, published in the Spring 2026 Edition of the Willa Cather Review. So the email then quotes, uh, from the episode that is being corrected here, which is the part where we talked about, uh, Willa Cather getting rejected
42:19 Tracy V. Wilson? a bunch of times when she tried to get My Antonia published, and then Viola Roseborough reading it and saying that it needed to be rewritten in the point of view of Jim Burden. The email continues, My Antonia was never offered to, let alone rejected, by any publishers. Cather's regular publisher, Hutten Mifflin, accepted it sight unseen when she first offered it to them. The remainder of the anecdote referenced is equally mistaken. Who's Antonia uses original source material to explain where it originated, why it is incorrect, and to whom it really refers. Uh, next in this email, there is a link to the full edition of, uh, or to this paper.
43:03 Tracy V. Wilson? At the Willa Cather Review, which is behind a membership firewall for a year, an abstract and excerpts and the work cited of this paper at academia.edu, and then a YouTube video of the presentation of this paper, which was at the June 2026 71st Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference. And then Scott continues, "As you will see, you are not the first to be misled. Attempts are ongoing to rebut the references to the errant Roseborough anecdote where it has appeared, including an Oxford Cambridge American Literature Teacher's Guide. If you have any questions or need additional information, please do not hesitate to ask. Regards, Scott."
43:45 Tracy V. Wilson? So Scott is the author of this paper. Thank you so much, Scott, for sending this. This is not information that existed when we did the episode, because we recorded it on something like May 15. And I did want to clarify, I don't know if the reference to it being removed from Wikipedia entries is a suggestion that we might have used those entries to research the show. We do not research the show using Wikipedia. I was very curious, though. I looked back at my resources that were part of the episode, and I did not go through all of them.
44:24 Tracy V. Wilson? But this little anecdote was in three papers by two different authors at least. That's where I stopped looking. And then I looked at the Wikipedia edit history, and it appears that Wikipedia's original source for this information is two of the papers that were part of my research. So like Wikipedia and I used the same resources for this. If this paper had happened, or if this episode had happened two months later, this might have been something I would have found, and I could have said, "This is a thing that has been repeated so many times, and we've just learned that it's wrong." But time...
45:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Did not align for that to happen.
45:12 Holly Frey? No, it happens so often. The second we publish a thing, the universe goes, "Hey, we're gonna do something here that's gonna make this
45:19 Tracy V. Wilson? By the way.
45:20 Holly Frey? ...item you wished you had done two months later." It just happens.
45:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, I know you didn't expect new information about someone when one of the things that we talked about is there being only one biography that was 600 or something pages long and doesn't exist in many collections. So anyway, thank you again, Scott, for sending this.
45:44 Tracy V. Wilson? We do not often get emails from folks about the research that they have done that has related to the show, but when it does happen, I'm always appreciative. Also appreciative to have something corrected that, you know, we would have avoided had it been possible, hopefully. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected] . And if you want to see the source lists for all of our episodes, including the source list of the Viola Roseborough episode, that is at our website, which is missedinhistory.com.
46:20 Tracy V. Wilson? You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else that you like to get your podcasts.
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