Dame Kathleen Lonsdale and Crystallography

Here is Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, one of the first women (alongside biochemist Marjory Stephenson) to be innagurated as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1945 (as I wrote yesterday, the Society began in 1663, so this achievement was long in the coming). Lonsdale’s work was in material chemistry — proving, for instance, that the benzene ring molecule is flat. The overall scientific field she specialized in is called crystallography. Although this might bring to mind translucent and colorful rocks to which new-age minded folk attribute postitve energy (the second picture is from a website listing “twenty powerful crystals and their healing properties”), in fact the science of crystallography is about the study of the makeup of crystals (which are homogeneous solids that have “a natural geometrically regular form with symmetrically arranged plane faces”), often on an atomic and molecular level. Lonsdale’s work helped progress this field, which is critically important for the development of medicines, and general advancement of developing materials. Kathleen Lonsdale only lived until she was 68, but had a full life. She became a committed pacifist and spent a month incarcerated during World War II for her ideals. In 1956, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the female equivalent of knighthood.