We Eventually Find Chemists Wherever We Look!

Today's Google doodle links to information about the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, a British chemist who contributed to the advancement of x-ray crystallography. This has been a really important field, and her work definitely deserves the mention from the doodle. A cool thing that happens when you click on one of these, of course, is the inevitable wikipedia-linking that follows from reading parts of the article on the subject. I quickly saw on the side of the article that Margaret Thatcher was once a student of Hodgkin's. I'm sure this is, or was, common knowledge to people that had more reason to know about Thatcher, but it wasn't for me. I find it fascinating when people doing big things in an unrelated field got their professional start as a chemist. I would say that this speaks to the way chemists have to think about problems, but you could make that argument about a lot of careers. In any case, Thatcher apparently held a pretty interesting alternative chemjob. I know that the current Pope and Angela Merkel also hold pretty cool alt-chemjobs. I wonder who I'll find out about next.