Dorothy Mary Moyle Needham FRS[1] (22 September 1896, London – 22 December 1987) was an English biochemist known for her work on the biochemistry of muscle. She was married to biochemist Joseph Needham.
Dorothy Mary Moyle was born in London, to patent clerk John Moyle. She attended Claremont College, Stockport before entering Girton College at the University of Cambridge. At Girton she became interested in chemistry, and biochemistry in particular after attending the lectures of Frederick Gowland Hopkins. After completing undergraduate studies in 1919, she was offered a research position with Hopkins—one of the few scientific leaders at Cambridge at the time who offered research opportunities for women—and she earned an Master of Arts in 1923, and a Ph.D. in 1930.[2]
Moyle's first major research, in collaboration with Dorothy L. Foster, focused on the interconversion of lactic acid and glycogen in muscle, recapitulating the work of Otto Meyerhof. After that, she studied the roles of succinic acid, fumaric acid, and malic acid in muscle metabolism, as well as the biochemical differences and relationships between aerobic and anaerobic pathways.[3]
Her major work: Machina Carnis: The Biochemistry of Muscular Contraction in its Historical Development[4] which traces all the developments in the field since 1600, was published in 1971 and reissued in paperback in 2009.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1948, as her husband had been in 1941. She was awarded an Doctor of Science in 1945. She was a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, a co-founder and fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and one of the first women fellows of Caius College.[5]