Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Copley Medal is the most prestigious award of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, given annually for sustained, outstanding achievements in any field of science. It is widely considered the highest British and Commonwealth award for scientific merit and alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the biological sciences.
The Copley Medal was first awarded in 1731 to Stephen Gray, for what the Royal Society called his new electrical experiments and his readiness in sharing discoveries. This makes it the oldest surviving scientific award in the world.
The Copley Medal is accompanied by a prize of twenty-five thousand pounds. The medal itself is made of silver-gilt.
John Theophilus Desaguliers holds the record with three wins, receiving the medal in 1734, 1736, and 1741.
Dorothy Hodgkin became the first female recipient in 1976, recognized for her outstanding work on the structures of complex molecules including penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin. The second female recipient was Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who received the medal in 2021 for her role in the discovery of pulsars.
Sixty-two Copley Medal recipients have also won a Nobel Prize, including nineteen in Physics, twenty-two in Physiology or Medicine, and twenty-one in Chemistry. Because the Copley Medal predates the Nobel Prize by nearly two centuries, it has often been viewed as a predecessor to the Nobel.