Dorothy M. Needham

Dorothy Mary Moyle Needham (1896 to 1987) was an English biochemist known for her work on the biochemistry of muscle, and she was a Fellow of the Royal Society. Born in London, she became interested in chemistry, and in biochemistry in particular, at Girton College, Cambridge, after attending the lectures of Frederick Gowland Hopkins, and after her undergraduate studies in 1919 she was offered a research position with Hopkins at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry in Cambridge. She earned a Master of Arts in 1923 and a PhD in 1930. Her first major research, with Dorothy L. Foster, concerned the interconversion of lactic acid and glycogen in muscle, and she then studied the roles of succinic, fumaric and malic acids in muscle metabolism. She was married to the biochemist Joseph Needham.