Science Quotes by Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

“I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.”
— Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 6th ed. 

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 Crowfoot Hodgkin
'X-ray Analysis of Complicated Molecules', Nobel Lecture (11 Dec 1964). In Nobel Lectures: Chemistry 1942-1962 (1964), 83. 

From the intensity of the spots near the centre, we can infer that the protein molecules are relatively dense globular bodies, perhaps joined together by valency bridges, but in any event separated by relatively large spaces which contain water. From the intensity of the more distant spots, it can be inferred that the arrangement of atoms inside the protein molecule is also of a perfectly definite kind, although without the periodicities characterising the fibrous proteins. The observations are compatible with oblate spheroidal molecules of diameters about 25 A. and 35 A., arranged in hexagonal screw-axis. ... At this stage, such ideas are merely speculative, but now that a crystalline protein has been made to give X-ray photographs, it is clear that we have the means of checking them and, by examining the structure of all crystalline proteins, arriving at a far more detailed conclusion about protein structure than previous physical or chemical methods have been able to give.
— Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
''X-Ray Photographs of Crystalline Pepsin', Nature (1934), 133, 795.

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 Crowfoot Hodgkin
'X-rays and the Structure of Insulin', British Medical Journal (1971), 4, 449. 

… I became captivated by the edifices chemists had raised through experiment and imagination—but 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 Crowfoot Hodgkin
(11 Dec 1964) The X-ray analysis of complicated molecules, Nobel Lecture.