After 35 years of research, Hodgkin and collaborators completed the full three-dimensional structure of insulin.
In 1969, after an extraordinary 35-year research effort that began with her first insulin diffraction photographs in 1934, Dorothy Hodgkin and her team of collaborators finally completed the full three-dimensional structure of insulin, the hormone essential for regulating blood sugar and treating diabetes.
Insulin's structure had proven vastly more complex than earlier molecules Hodgkin had solved, such as penicillin and vitamin B12, requiring the collection and analysis of enormous quantities of X-ray diffraction data. The project benefited from major advances in computing technology during the 1960s, which finally allowed the mountains of crystallographic data to be processed within a feasible timeframe—something impossible with the manual calculation methods available when the project began in the 1930s.
The completed insulin structure revealed how the hormone's molecules assemble into hexameric units around zinc ions, providing crucial insight into insulin's biological storage and release mechanisms in the pancreas. This structural knowledge directly informed later efforts to engineer synthetic and recombinant insulins for diabetes treatment, contributing to improved therapies for millions of people with diabetes worldwide.
The completion of the insulin structure represented the capstone achievement of Hodgkin's scientific career, a project she had pursued with unwavering dedication across more than three decades, through world war, chronic illness, and the birth of an entirely new field of computational crystallography.