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| Colouring by letters: the life of Dorothy Hodgkin | Colouring by letters: the life of Dorothy Hodgkin |
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| The kindly face of one of Britain’s most accomplished scientists gazes out from the photograph. But the hairstyle and the fact that the picture is black and white distances her from us – this is clearly a figure from history. Photography is all very well for recording details precisely but when drained of colour something of the life of the sitter is lost in translation. Black and white photography may be used to capture mood or character with great sensitivity but the human imagination still struggles to bridge the gulf between the living and the dead. | The kindly face of one of Britain’s most accomplished scientists gazes out from the photograph. But the hairstyle and the fact that the picture is black and white distances her from us – this is clearly a figure from history. Photography is all very well for recording details precisely but when drained of colour something of the life of the sitter is lost in translation. Black and white photography may be used to capture mood or character with great sensitivity but the human imagination still struggles to bridge the gulf between the living and the dead. |
| That point was brought home to me earlier this week when I came across a post about a Reddit thread full of colourised photographs of figures and events from the past. In one corner of my mind there is something not quite right about the artifice — the addition of colour has to be at least in part the work of the imagination. But the vivid colourised images of Lincoln and Monet and Picasso, or of Einstein, Twain and Goebbels gave an immediacy to these historical figures that I had never seen before and swept away my reservations. | That point was brought home to me earlier this week when I came across a post about a Reddit thread full of colourised photographs of figures and events from the past. In one corner of my mind there is something not quite right about the artifice — the addition of colour has to be at least in part the work of the imagination. But the vivid colourised images of Lincoln and Monet and Picasso, or of Einstein, Twain and Goebbels gave an immediacy to these historical figures that I had never seen before and swept away my reservations. |
| The same catapulting into the past can be done with sound as BBC Radio 4 did this past week with An Eye for Pattern: the Letters of Dorothy Hodgkin, a programme timed to mark the 50th anniversary of her award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In five short broadcasts mostly comprising readings from letters to and from the great scientist, narrated artfully and unintrusively by Georgina Ferry, her long life was re-animated. | The same catapulting into the past can be done with sound as BBC Radio 4 did this past week with An Eye for Pattern: the Letters of Dorothy Hodgkin, a programme timed to mark the 50th anniversary of her award of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In five short broadcasts mostly comprising readings from letters to and from the great scientist, narrated artfully and unintrusively by Georgina Ferry, her long life was re-animated. |
| We are fortunate that Hodgkin’s parents were in Africa for much of her childhood in England and that work commitments kept her and her husband apart for much of their married life. These separations generated a treasure trove of letters – enlarged by correspondence with friends and colleagues – that start with accounts of her first experiments with chemistry in her bedroom when she was 12, and continue well past the joy of her Nobel Prize win in 1964. | |
| One cannot but warm to a figure who even in her 20s begins letters to her parents with “My dearest Mummy and Daddy … ” But Hodgkin was no childish ingenue, obsessed by science and ignorant of the ways of the world. This was a woman who adored her parents but also took her PhD supervisor, the brilliant and bohemian JD Bernal, as her lover. She terminated that relationship to pursue her future husband but did so in a letter of such grace and honesty that she and Bernal were to remain friends for life. | |
| Her first love, however, was always science. Beginning in chemistry she was a pioneer in the 1920s and 30s of the new art of X-ray crystallography and soon became one of its most expert practitioners. The letters do a wonderful job of charting her progress from a young student, suspecting but always doubting her abilities, to a figure who commanded the international stage but never forgot her obligations to her co-workers. Here is science as it happens in real life, in real lives: the hopes and fears, the ambition and the disappointment; and its inevitable humanity. I won’t delay you any further so that you can go and listen for yourself. | Her first love, however, was always science. Beginning in chemistry she was a pioneer in the 1920s and 30s of the new art of X-ray crystallography and soon became one of its most expert practitioners. The letters do a wonderful job of charting her progress from a young student, suspecting but always doubting her abilities, to a figure who commanded the international stage but never forgot her obligations to her co-workers. Here is science as it happens in real life, in real lives: the hopes and fears, the ambition and the disappointment; and its inevitable humanity. I won’t delay you any further so that you can go and listen for yourself. |
| Those who wish to know more should consult Georgina Ferry’s biography — Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life. | Those who wish to know more should consult Georgina Ferry’s biography — Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life. |
| @Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College, vice-chair of Science is Vital and a director of CaSE. | @Stephen_Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College, vice-chair of Science is Vital and a director of CaSE. |