Dorothy Hodgkin Google Logo Marks The Nobel Prize Winning Biochemist’s 104th Birthday

Adding another woman to the list  Google logo honorees, today’s Google homepage recognizes the accomplishments of British biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin.

The logo depicts an illustration of penicillin’s molecular structure, a discovery made by Hodgkin in 1945. While it had already been theorized, Hodgkin and her colleagues confirmed penicillin’s structure through her research in x-ray crystallography, and later published a paper on their findings in 1949.

Hodgkin’s dedicated her career to x-ray crystallography, the process used to identify atomic and molecular structures. Among her many achievements, she is credited with the development of protein crystallography, as well as determining the structure of vitamin B  and insulin.

In 1964, Hodgkin was the third woman to receive a Nobel Prize in chemistry, following Marie Curie in 1911 and Irène Joliot-Curie in 1934.

Hodgkin died in 1994 at the age of 84 after suffering cardiac stroke. In her lifetime she was awarded a Copley Medal, was named a Fellow of the Royal Society and served as Bristol University’s Chancellor from 1970 to 1988.