After roughly 35 years of research, Hodgkin and her team solved the 3D structure of rhombohedral 2Zn insulin, a landmark in structural biology and diabetes research.
In 1969, Dorothy Hodgkin and her research team achieved what she considered the crowning accomplishment of her scientific career: the determination of the three-dimensional structure of rhombohedral 2Zn insulin. This breakthrough came after approximately 35 years of sustained effort — Hodgkin had first begun studying insulin crystals as early as 1934, making this one of the longest continuous research projects in the history of structural chemistry.
Insulin, the hormone essential for regulating blood glucose and central to the treatment of diabetes, presented an enormously complex crystallographic challenge due to its size and the limitations of X-ray technology and computing power available in earlier decades. Only with the advent of more powerful computers and improved crystallographic techniques was Hodgkin's team finally able to resolve the full atomic structure of the molecule.
The successful determination of insulin's structure provided crucial insight into how the hormone functions at a molecular level, informing later efforts to engineer synthetic and recombinant insulin for diabetes treatment. Hodgkin continued refining this work, publishing a higher-resolution insulin structure in 1988 with collaborators. Her decades-long persistence on this single molecule exemplified her extraordinary scientific patience and determination, and the insulin structure remains one of her most celebrated and medically significant achievements.