celebrating Dorothy Hodgkin

This week marks the centenary of crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1964. Today, Monday, there will be an event at the Oxford University Museum, which I understand involves a bust being unveiled.

On Wednesday (the actual birthday), there will be celebrations at the Royal Society in London (DH being among the first women to be elected to the ranks of the RS fellows), and on Thu, a one-woman play written by Hodgkin's biographer Georgina Ferry will be shown at Lady Margaret Hall.

Oh, and it looks like I missed the annual Dorothy Hodgkin lecture this year, it was held by Elspeth Garman in March.

PS (Tuesday) turned out that the play was also shown at yesterday's event, and it was quite wonderful.

The bust was unveiled by Dorothy's little sister, shown here just after the veil came off:



Apparently it's another "first female" for Dorothy Hodgkin, as all the other scientists represented by statues or busts around the museum are male. The style doesn't fit in with the male colleagues, I'm afraid, wo have either full statues or at least head and shoulders, and who are mostly in light coloured stone. So this severed dark head sticks out a bit, but maybe that was the idea.

PPS (Wed) just found out that one can hear a complete lecture by Dorothy Hodgkin (on the insulin structure, held at the 1970 Nobel Laureates Meeting at Lindau) here.

olives and lemons

I'm back from a very quick TGV visit to my relatives in Provence, have uploaded a few pictures to my VIEW profile, mainly impressions from Avignon, where the festival was in full swing and theatre was spilling over into the streets to an extent that made it really difficult to work out where the theatrical ended and real life began. Now was that a real street sweeper with the rubbish trolley over there, or an actor wheeling a prop around?




olives at Nyons, not far from the world centre for olive cultivation.



Near the Pont du Gard, an olive tree which looks as if it might be nearly as old as the famous aquaeduct

More impressions to follow ...

oh what a lovely war

Saw a school production of Oh, What a Lovely War! which was quite interesting. The stage musical is as old as I am, so a bit dodgy and embarrassing, but still standing. I wasn't aware of the piece beforehand, but apparently it was very popular in the 60s (like me) and there was a film version directed by Richard Attenborough with an impossibly stellar cast.

It's World War I treated with equal measures of reportage, satire, and surrealism. Which may be what the subject matter deserves. For me, the serious and surreal parts worked better than the jokes which were mainly based on nationality stereotyping.

Most of all, I admire the energy of all people involved. Getting 200 kids to act in a coordinated way that is even vaguely recognisable as a play would look like an impossible task to me ...


PS a couple of years ago they played Red Demon by Hideki Noda.