How Thatcher The Chemist Helped Make Thatcher The Politician
Margaret Thatcher Publicity photo for the 1951 election campaign. The Royal SocietyBefore becoming Britain's first (and only) female prime minister, Thatcher graduated from Oxford with a chemistry degree. Margaret Thatcher died today at 87. She'll be remembered as the first (and only) woman to be prime minister of Britain, but what's often missed or only glanced over in her biographies, and now her obituaries, is her career as a chemist. Thatcher graduated from Oxford in 1947 with an undergraduate degree in chemistry. Her fourth-year dissertation was on X-ray crystallography of the antibiotic cocktail gramicidin, and her supervisor, Dorothy Hodgkin, was working at the time on the structure of penicillin. In the years after, Thatcher worked as an industrial chemist at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons, with a probably apocryphal story circulating that she helped produce a form of soft-scoop ice cream. It's seldom discussed how much her...