Hodgkin used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of penicillin, confirming its unusual beta-lactam ring and enabling large-scale synthesis efforts.
By 1946, Dorothy Hodgkin had successfully determined the molecular structure of penicillin using X-ray crystallography, resolving one of the most urgent chemical puzzles of the Second World War era. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming and developed as a life-saving antibiotic by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, had been mass-produced before its precise chemical structure was fully understood.
Chemists were divided over whether penicillin contained a highly strained and unusual beta-lactam ring or a more conventional thiazolidine-oxazolone structure. Hodgkin's painstaking crystallographic analysis, conducted amid wartime shortages of equipment and using laborious hand calculations before the advent of computers, confirmed the correct — and controversial — beta-lactam structure.
This determination was more than an academic triumph: it provided the essential structural knowledge that enabled chemists to pursue the synthesis and later modification of penicillin, leading to the development of semi-synthetic penicillins and other beta-lactam antibiotics that remain vital to medicine today. Hodgkin's work on penicillin exemplified how fundamental structural chemistry could have immediate, life-saving practical applications, and it further cemented her international reputation as a scientist capable of solving structures once thought intractable.