6. Nobel Prize Winners of Oxford and Cambridge The...

6. Nobel Prize Winners of Oxford and Cambridge The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are both known for their Nobel laureates – Oxford has 69 and Cambridge has an astonishing 118, more than any other university in the world except Harvard, and more than any country other than the USA and UK. Here are two of the most interesting and notable Nobel laureates of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 1. Dorothy Hodgkin (Oxford and Cambridge, Chemistry, 1964) The first British woman to win a Nobel prize, Dorothy Hodgkin is a graduate of both Oxford, where she studied for her BSc and then returned as a fellow – and Cambridge, where she studied for her PhD. At the time when she was studying for her BSc in Oxford, she would not have been able to take a degree at Cambridge, which did not grant women full degrees until 1947. Hodgkin’s work was focused around her refinement of the technique of X-ray crystallography, which enabled her to uncover the structure of different biomolecules. This included confirming the structure of penicillin, and discovering the structure of vitamin B12 and later insulin – discoveries which helped to uncover how these biomolecules work. As a tutor at Oxford, Hodgkin taught Margaret Thatcher when she was an undergraduate, and Thatcher later displayed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing St, though the two women had markedly different political views. Alongside the Nobel prize, her groundbreaking work was recognised with the Order of Merit, which she became only the second woman to receive, after Florence Nightingale, and she was also the first woman to receive the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. 2. Amartya Sen (Oxford and Cambridge, Economics, 1998) Born in Bengal in 1933, Amartya Sen was just nine years old when he witnessed the famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Nearly 20 years later, he wrote on poverty and famines, arguing that a famine is not only caused by lack of food – indeed, that in Bengal in 1943 there had been sufficient food to feed the population, had its supply not been affected by British military policies, panic buying and rapid price rises. By then, he was teaching at the University of Oxford – he would later also become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge – and his scholarly approach that combined philosophy with economics have led to him being regarded as one of the world’s leading intellectuals. It was for his work on famine that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sen has led on our economic understanding of development and the developing world, providing new means of assessing poverty and the welfare of a population. He has argued that such measures should be used alongside other measures such as GDP and productivity measures, so that governments will be able to assess the impact of their policies on people’s day-to-day lives. 12. Which one of the following is NOT the achievement of Dorothy Hodgkin？

A、Discovering the structure of vitamin B12 and later insulin.

B、Confirming the structure of penicillin.

C、Confirming the structure of artemisinin.

D、Refinement of the technique of X-ray crystallography.