The annual Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture is a much-awaited feature of the Somerville year. First established in 1999 under the Principalship of Dame Fiona Caldicott, it provides an opportunity to celebrate Dorothy Hodgkin’s scientific and humanitarian legacy with a lecture from today’s leading scientists.
Last Friday 8th March, we were privileged to welcome as speaker for the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024 Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. Part of the long tradition of ground-breaking women scientists at Oxford, Prof Tracey was the ideal speaker at a lecture commemorating not only 60 years since Dorothy Hodgkin received her Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but also International Women’s Day, which fell on the same day.
Prof Tracey’s highly accessible lecture began by giving the audience a concise review of brain research across the ages, from ancient Greece to the present day, as a way into her own team’s work on reception of pain. Showing how magnetic resonance imaging developed alongside the work of radio crystallographers such as Hodgkin, she explained how this enabled more recent work in her field. It was fascinating to see how scientists can map the brain’s response to pain stimuli and, though slightly worrying to think of our Vice Chancellor inflicting electric shocks on her (willing!) volunteer students, this has clearly enabled huge leaps in her research.
Prof Tracey delivering her lecture at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Prof Tracey delivering her lecture at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Dorothy Hodgkin's daughter, Liz, at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Prof Tracey delivering her lecture at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Honorary Fellow Afua Kyei (CFO of the Bank of England) at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Dorothy Hodgkin's former student and Fellow Emerita Margaret Adams with Neeta Patel CBE Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Newly appointed Honorary Fellow Pat Owtram at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Honorary Fellow Catherine Royle at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Fellow Emerita Lesley Brown at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Principal Jan Royall introducing the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
The Dorothy Hodgkin Exhibition at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
The exhibition at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
Guests at the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture 2024
On the way to the Foundation Day Dinner
Guests at the Foundation Day Dinner
The choir singing at the Foundation Day Dinner
The choir singing at the Foundation Day Dinner
Prof Tracey also considered how people’s feeling of pain often differs from the scientific ‘facts’ of brain imaging. In the area of placebo, for instance, one experiment showed that, despite being given a steady flow of analgesics, a person’s feeling of pain varied depending on whether they were told they were being given a painkiller or not. It is clearly an ethical minefield, but one surgeon had managed to demonstrate that just the fact of having been through surgery could decrease patients’ chronic pain, even if nothing medical was in fact done during that operation. Finishing with a final explanation of her team’s work on the personalisation of anaesthetic delivery, so that patients could recover more quickly and effectively after surgery, she showed how the field in which she has been pre-eminent is moving forward.
After a torrent of well-handled audience questions, Professor Tracey remained with us to celebrate at Somerville’s Foundation Dinner. Other esteemed guests joined us for the event, from Liz Hodgkin, Dorothy’s daughter, to Somervillian Dame June Raine, CEO of the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency). We also celebrated two new Honorary Fellows: Afua Kyei, Chief Financial Officer of the Bank of England, and Patricia Owtram, who, at almost 100, was a code breaker and cypher officer in WW2.
Our thanks to Prof Tracey for a brilliant lecture, to our librarian and archivist for curating a fascinating exhibition of Dorothy Hodgkin’s correspondence and belongings and to the many Somervillians and friends of Somerville who joined us in making Friday night so memorable.
Report by Jackie Watson (1986, English)