Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Wilkins was born on 15 December 1916 in Pongaroa, New Zealand, and died on 6 October 2004 in London. He joined the Medical Research Council's Biophysics Unit at King's College London in 1946 and by around 1950 had turned its X-ray diffraction equipment on DNA, producing, with Raymond Gosling, some of the first diffraction patterns showing DNA had a regular, helical structure. Wilkins later showed an image made by Rosalind Franklin to James Watson without her knowledge, an episode central to the priority dispute over the double helix's discovery. Wilkins, Watson and Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids.