Maurice Wilkins

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Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins (December 15, 1916 – October 5, 2004) was a physicist who mainly worked in the field of X-rays.

Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, north Wairarapa, New Zealand, but his family moved to England when he was six. He studied physics at St. John's College, Cambridge, then in 1940 received his Ph.D. in physics at Birmingham University. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley for 2 years before returning to King's College, London. "After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan," he told Britain's Encounter radio programme in 1999.

At King's College he pursued, among other things X-ray diffraction work. It was his work, along with that of his colleague Rosalind Franklin that led James D. Watson and Francis Crick to deduce the structure of DNA in 1953; he went on to prove that the double-helical structure they proposed was indeed correct.

He married Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959. They had two children, Sarah and George.

In 1960 he was presented with the American Public Health Association's Albert Lasker Award, and in 1962 he was made a Companion of the British Empire. Also in 1962 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick. Wilkins' reputation was untarnished although it was he who obtained Rosalind Franklin's x-ray images without permission to help deduce the structure of DNA. Franklin's name was excluded from the authors of the famous paper in the esteemed science journal Nature. Many in the molecular biology community have long felt that since Franklin died early, and Wilkins was much less of a publicity-seeker, that Watson and Crick have in the popular mind overshadowed Wilkins and Franklin to an undeserved degree. For instance, while most textbooks describe the double helix as the "W-C" (for "Watson-Crick") model of DNA, there is a longstanding tradition at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of referring to it as the "W-C-M-F" model with the M for "Maurice" and the F for "Franklin."

He published his autobiography, "The Third Man of the Double Helix," in 2003. He died a year later. At the time of his death, he was still a member of King's College London staff and remained an ardent campaigner against nuclear weapons.

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