Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004), British biophysicist and Nobel laureate, who contributed to the determination of the structure of the nucleic acid known as DNA. Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, New Zealand, and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Birmingham in 1940. He became a member of the Medical Research Council at King's College, University of London, in 1946, advancing to the position of deputy director in 1955. Wilkins studied the structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecule by X-ray diffraction techniques and discovered that the molecule appeared to have a double spiral structure. On the basis of his work, the American biochemist James Dewey Watson and the British biophysicist Francis Crick deduced the structure of the molecule. Wilkins, Watson, and Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.