50 Years Ago

The award of the Order of Merit (the personal gift of the Queen) to Prof. Dorothy Hodgkin makes history in that she is the first woman scientist ever to receive it, and only the second woman to be so honoured by the monarch since the Order was instituted. That she should now be joining Florence Nightingale in this eminence has its parallels and its contrasts. Dorothy Hodgkin is a person of very deep humanitarian interests and concerns ... whose work, incidentally, has been carried out against the background of a demanding but happy family life. Her special genius has lain in the unravelling of the structure, by X-ray methods, of complex molecules, and its special timeliness has lain in the fact that she has carried it deep into the realm of biologically important substances (see Nature of December 5, 1964). Dorothy Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in 1964.

From Nature 10 April 1965

100 Years Ago

Until the last few years the word margarine was usually associated, in the mind of the British public, with poverty; but now, under the new name of “Nuts and milk,” with which advertising enterprise has made us familiar, it is becoming freely used in the kitchen, and is even found on the breakfast table in many households ... It is desirable at the outset to emphasise that the margarine industry is essentially scientific in character, and that considerable technical skill is demanded in its manufacture ... moreover ... edible fats available for the masses at half the price of butter ... must be proclaimed as yet another of the achievements of science in the service of man.

From Nature 8 April 1915 Footnote 1