When There Was Nothing Personal About Computers

By Sue Chehrenegar

As the world enters the second half of the first decade of the 21st Century, the world’s citizens find computers playing an increasingly larger part in almost every aspect of life.
Just over fifty years ago, however, computers remained large and unwieldy. At that time only a limited number of people had an opportunity to work with any sort of computer.

During the first half of the 1950s, one research scientist helped to shine a spotlight on the great benefits of the computer. Dorothy Crawfoot Hodgkin, Ph.D., working with colleagues at UCLA, relied on computers to interpret all of the data that had been collected on vitamin B12.

Dr. Hodgkin had turned to the technology known as crystallographic analysis in order to study the reflected X-rays from a B12 molecule. The positions and intensities of those reflected X-rays, when combined with information about their phases, was supposed to unveil the structure of the B12 molecule.

But because B12 was such a large molecule, the calculations required of UCLA’s crystallographers had proved to be extremely complex. Before Hodgkin made her important and groundbreaking effort, scientists had uncovered data on less than half of the B12 molecule.

Hodgkin and her colleagues used computers to add-up the long series of numbers that represented the different intensities and positions of the reflected X-rays. Hodgkin and her team worked on that one project for six years. During that six-year period they took 2,500 pictures of the B12 crystals. Finally, in 1956 Hodgkin and her co-workers shared with the world the complete structure of the B12 molecule.

Using the same technology, Hodgkin also uncovered the structure of penicillin. In 1964 Dorothy Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Scientists the world over recognized her important contribution to the discovery of the molecular structure of penicillin and Vitamin B12. This recognition represented the only time when a British female received an invitation to the annual ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

Go to Rewind the Fifties Home