The Mathematics of Devotion

The gentle hum of machinery fills Dorothy Hodgkin's laboratory as she tapes another pencil to her swollen fingers. It's 1935, and she's mapping the structure of insulin molecule by molecule, atom by atom. While others might delegate such tedious work, her eyes remain fixed on each calculation, her attention absolute.

For decades, she would create thousands of electron density maps by hand – the same measurements, the same careful calculations, day after day. Her colleagues often suggested using assistants for the basic work. They meant well. But Dorothy's eyes remained fixed on each data point, knowing that precision here meant everything.

“I used to say that the evening I developed the first X-ray photograph I took of insulin in 1935 was the most exciting moment of my life," she later recalled in her Nobel lecture. "But the Saturday afternoon in late July 1969, when we realized that the insulin electron density map was interpretable, runs that moment very close.”