Nobel prize chemist dies at 84

PROFESSOR Dorothy Hodgkin, who won the Nobel prize, taught Margaret Thatcher chemistry and became the first woman since Florence Nightingale to be admitted to the Order of Merit, has died at the age of 84, writes John Shirley.

Her son, Luke, said last night that his mother had returned to her home in Shipton- on-Stour, Warwickshire, two days ago after hospital treatment following a fall two weeks ago. She died after a stroke.

Dorothy Hodgkin won the 1964 Nobel prize for chemistry for her work on determining the structure of penicillin and insulin, and of Vitamin B12.

She was a founder-member of the Pugwash conference, the international organisation of scientists who, during the Cold War, tried to further communication between Western and Iron Curtain scientists.

Born in 1910 in Cairo, Professor Hodgkin studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and did research at Cambridge. She returned to teach at Somerville, where Margaret Thatcher was among her students, and was Wolfson Research Professor at Oxford from 1960 to 1977.