Dorothy M. Needham

Dorothy Mary Moyle Needham FRS (22 September 1896 – 22 December 1987) was an English biochemist known for her work on the biochemistry of muscle. She was married to biochemist Joseph Needham.

Dorothy Moyle was born in London, to patent clerk John Thomas Moyle and his wife, Ellen Daves. She attended Claremont College, , an institution run by her aunt, Agnes Daves, and St Hilary's School, Alderley Edge, 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, in which she obtained a 3rd Class Honours, 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—at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry, Cambridge, and she earned a Master of Arts in 1923, and a Ph.D. in 1930.

Moyle married fellow biochemist (Noël) Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham on 13 September 1924. The couple had no children.

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. She subsequently worked on cyclic phosphate transfer in muscle contraction and, with collaborators, established for the first time a direct correlation of structure and function in muscle by confirming in 1939 that myosin, the contractile protein of muscle, behaves as the enzyme ATPase (adenosine triphosphatase).

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