Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004) was a New Zealand-born British biophysicist and Nobel laureate whose research spanned multiple areas of physics and biophysics, contributing to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction.

He is known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA.

Wilkins' work on DNA falls into two distinct phases.

Later, he attended Wylde Green College and then went to King Edward's School, Birmingham from 1929 to 1934.

Wilkins went to St John's College, Cambridge in 1935; he studied the Natural Sciences Tripos, specialising in Physics, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938.

Mark Oliphant, who was one of Wilkins' instructors at St. John's, had been appointed to the Chair of Physics at the University of Birmingham, and had appointed John Randall to his staff.

Wilkins became a PhD student of Randall at the University of Birmingham.

Wilkins received a PhD for this work in 1940.

During World War II Wilkins developed improved radar screens at Birmingham, then worked on isotope separation at the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley during the years 1944–45.

Meanwhile, Randall had been appointed to the Chair of Physics at the University of St Andrews.

In 1945, they published four papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on phosphorescence and electron traps.

In 1945, he appointed Wilkins as Assistant Lecturer in his department at the University of St Andrews.

Randall was negotiating with the Medical Research Council (MRC) to set up a laboratory to apply the experimental methods of physics to problems of biology.

The combination of these disciplines as biophysics was a novel idea.

The MRC told Randall that this had to be done in another university.

In 1946 Randall was appointed Wheatstone Professor of Physics, in charge of the entire Physics department at King's College, London, with the funding to set up a Biophysics Unit.

He brought Wilkins with him as Assistant Director of the unit.

They appointed a team of scientists trained in both the physical and biological sciences.

The "management philosophy" was to explore the use of many techniques in parallel, to find which looked promising, and then to focus on these.

Wilkins, as the scientist with most diverse experience of physics and Assistant Director of the unit, had general oversight of the varied projects besides direct involvement in his personal research projects that included new types of optical microscopy.

King's College received funding to build completely new Physics and Engineering Departments where vaults beneath the Strand level College forecourt had been destroyed by bombs during the War.

The first was in 1948–1950, when his initial studies produced the first clear X-ray images of DNA, which he presented at a conference in Naples in 1951 attended by James Watson.

During the second phase, 1951–52, Wilkins produced clear "B form" X-shaped images from squid sperm, images he sent to James Watson and Francis Crick, causing Watson to write "Wilkins... has obtained extremely excellent X-ray diffraction photographs" [of DNA].

The Biophysics Unit, several more experimental physics groups and the theoretical group started to move in, during the early months of 1952.

The laboratories were opened formally by Lord Cherwell on 27 June.

Wilkins' article for Nature described both departments, consistent with his leadership role and prestige within the college at large.

At King's College, Wilkins pursued, among other things, X-ray diffraction work on ram sperm and DNA that had been obtained from calf thymus by the Swiss scientist Rudolf Signer.

The DNA from Signer's lab was much more intact than the DNA which had previously been isolated.

Wilkins discovered that it was possible to produce thin threads from this concentrated DNA solution that contained highly ordered arrays of DNA suitable for the production of X-ray diffraction patterns.

Using a carefully bundled group of these DNA threads and keeping them hydrated, Wilkins and a graduate student Raymond Gosling obtained X-ray photographs of DNA that showed that the long, thin DNA molecule in the sample from Signer had a regular, crystal-like structure in these threads.

In 1953, Wilkins' group coordinator Sir John Randall instructed Raymond Gosling to hand over to Wilkins a high-quality image of "B" form DNA (Photo 51), which Gosling had made in 1952, after which his supervisor Rosalind Franklin "put it aside" as she was leaving King's College London.

Wilkins showed it to Watson.

This image, along with the knowledge that Linus Pauling had proposed an incorrect structure of DNA, "mobilised" Watson and Crick to restart model building.

With additional information from research reports of Wilkins and Franklin, obtained via Max Perutz, Watson and Crick correctly described the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.

Wilkins continued to test, verify, and make significant corrections to the Watson–Crick DNA model and to study the structure of RNA.

Wilkins, Crick, and Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, New Zealand, where his father, Edgar Henry Wilkins, was a medical doctor.

His older sister was the translator and poet Eithne Wilkins.

His family had come from Dublin, where his paternal and maternal grandfathers were, respectively, Headmaster of Dublin High School and a Chief of Police.

The Wilkinses moved to Birmingham, England when Maurice was 6.