Lovelace-Hodgkin Symposium

As a student I was fortunate to have Dorothy Hodgkin as a Tutor and then as a Research Supervisor.  As an undergraduate student, I had a tutorial with her every week for one term of each year; she prescribed an essay topic each week and usually handed me a reprint of a relevant scientific paper.  She would listen to my expression of interest in particular topics, and try to incorporate them into my work.  In those undergraduate years, too, she advised me on the lectures and lab classes which I should be going to, and arranged with other tutors in other areas of Chemistry with whom I would work in the other two terms of the year.  There were occasional social invitations to her home where I and a few others would be gathered warmly and informally into her family.

After graduation, I joined her research group in X-ray Crystallography.  It was all very informal, probably the only formality was to get a key (very large and ornate) to the big main door of the Pitt Rivers Museum of Natural History, in one corner of which Dorothy had several rooms.  At least 8-10 people worked in one large room; each had a desk, and there were some communal supplies, paper, tracing paper, rods and beads for making models, and some books.  Dorothy worked in her room next door.  X-ray equipment and crystal mounting were in the basement - you walked past the dinosaur skeletons to get there.

Dorothy had listened to my expression of interest in studying a metal coordination complex and procured some suitable crystals from a colleague for me to start on.   I was immediately shown how to mount a crystal and record X-ray diffraction patterns; then it took me some time to understand how deductions about structure were made from these.  Dorothy would ask other members of the research group to show me other techniques, or I would be left to ask or find out from books myself.  There was no formal teaching.

The research group was large and varied, with a few recent graduates from Oxford, but many who had come from elsewhere in the UK or abroad to work with her; some were research assistants, some were on scholarships or post-doctoral fellowships, but I was certainly unaware of these distinctions at the time. Dorothy introduced each of these people to a research project, either a big ongoing one like the many aspects of the vitamin B₁₂ structure or an independent natural product problem which some chemist or biochemist had asked for her help on.  From time to time (sometimes each day, sometimes much less often) Dorothy would come through from her room next door, and there would be conversations about how to proceed on each particular problem;  I could work away at my own calculations, or listen and learn.  And there were coffee breaks, with casual discussions, and other people from whom to ask advice.  A year later, we all moved to a newer building, but the pattern of life remained similar.   I think it was all rather different from more highly organised research groups these days, and appeared to be more casual, although Dorothy was probably planning and exercising foresight over it all.

Quite frequently, Dorothy would have visits from crystallographers from different parts of the UK or the world, and they would often take an interest in some of the projects going on.  Sometimes there would be a lecture about the visitor's work, sometimes an invitation to Dorothy's home to meet socially - often all very informally arranged, at the last minute.  Linus Pauling came on one occasion.   Dorothy was very good at encouraging young people to go to conferences, and so learn what other research was going on (not necessarily, as so often expected today, to present their own work); she would find small grants to help where necessary.   When she learned that John Kendrew was to give a lecture in Cambridge on his new 6Å resolution structure determination of myoglobin, the first protein structure ever to be solved, she sent a carload of us in her own car to Cambridge to hear all about it!

I became aware, from conferences, visitors and scientific literature, that there was crystallographic activity in quite a number of university departments around the UK, as well as abroad, but it was only later that I realised that research groups were not all as big, varied and interesting as Dorothy's!   However, when after those 6 years, I moved to the University of Edinburgh, I had had a very valuable and enjoyable introduction to crystallographic research, an area in which I continued to work for most of the rest of my life.

There were other things I learned from Dorothy’s example too, which I did not analyse or fully understand at the time.  Even in science, which may be thought of as inanimate and objective, relationships with people matter. And the basis for a good relationship is care and concern for other people and interest in them. I have always liked to be interested in tutorial groups or research groups as people and look for opportunities to mix with them socially; I have invited them round to my home for coffee or meals or whatever was practicable – often alongside my husband’s (history) students. 

What has all this got to do with AI?  AI is fascinating in its methods and potential for solving problems.  This has been demonstrated for many inanimate problems, where given initial information the computer has found a way to the result which the human was working towards much more slowly.  Protein crystallography offers an excellent example:  when the sequence of amino acids which constitute a new protein is known, an AI procedure in the computer Deep Mind can now arrive at the detailed three-dimensional structure quickly, which can then be experimentally verified; in the past the experimental structure determination would take much longer, and predictions were far from reliable. But there are many other applications of AI in which human well-being should also be considered - in the selection or acquisition of data to be used, in the management of human activities, or, further back, in the need for huge amounts of computing power, and the raw materials and other resources used up in providing this.   Dorothy Hodgkin’s message would certainly be: don’t lose sight of the people involved; show care and concern for them too.

Marjorie Harding

August 2024

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First published: 2 September 2024