Obituary: Maurice Wilkins

By ARNOLD PICKMERE and AGENCIES

* Maurice Wilkins, scientist. Died aged 87.

New Zealand-born scientist Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962, together with the two scientists credited with describing the structure of DNA, Francis Crick and James Watson.

Hailed yesterday as New Zealand's second-greatest international scientist after Rutherford, the reticent Wilkins became the almost invisible part of the three-way prize as the British Crick and American Watson and their announcement of a structure for DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) captured world attention.

The discovery has revolutionised biology and medicine, with its "building blocks" of DNA containing material that is unique to an individual but is also inherited. DNA is now also commonly used in crime cases for accurately pinpointing criminals and their culpability.

The Nobel Prize organisation said the prize for Crick, Watson and Wilkins was "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

More recently, Wilkins' award has faced some argument over the contribution of Rosalind Franklin and the x-ray techniques used to produce images of the structure of molecules. Franklin died of cancer, aged 37, in 1958, before the award was made.

As Keith Stewart of the NZ Listener described it, after interviewing little-hailed Wilkins in 1994, Wilkins made the breakthrough that would lead to the sensational unveiling of the structure of DNA in 1953.

Looking at DNA gel through a microscope, Wilkins, quite by chance, noticed that when he touched the gel with a glass rod, regular fibres could be pulled out.

Their regularity suggested they would be ideal subjects for x-ray diffraction, a way of revealing the structure of molecules by shining an x-ray beam through them. If it worked it would give scientists their first view of the shape of DNA.

It did. By 1951 he had some quite spectacular photos.

By the time the Cambridge pair of Crick and Watson had finished their DNA model in 1953 Wilkins and his King's College, London, team, beefed up by x-ray diffraction specialist Rosalind Franklin, had provided Crick and Watson with a plan for their construction.

Not only had they proved for them the helix shape of DNA, they had proved it was a double helix, highly regular and with the phosphates of DNA on the outside of the structure.

Crick and Watson's findings made them very famous. Keith Stewart's Listener article noted: "It seemed to matter little that Wilkins' work was essential to their success, or that Rosalind Franklin's x-ray photographs were of a quality that left little doubt about what they should do."

Lord May of Oxford, president of Britain's Royal Society (academy of scientists), said this week that Watson and Crick used the data from Wilkins, together with Franklin, to show that the organic bases of DNA were paired in a specific manner in the intertwined helices.

"The roles of Wilkins and Franklin, which were crucial, have not always been fully acknowledged outside the scientific community."

The Nobel Prize organisation has already made its considered judgment. The race to DNA at the time was a very competitive field and further essays on the subject seem certain.

We call Wilkins a New Zealander because he was born in at Pongaroa in the Wairarapa.

His parents were Irish and his father a doctor who took the family back to Britain when Maurice was six. He received his physics degree at Cambridge University in 1938 and completed a PhD thesis on the theory of phosphorescence.

Maurice Wilkins' contributions to science certainly did not rest with this major DNA achievement alone. Before World War II he went to Birmingham University to work with physicist John Randall, later knighted for his contributions to greatly improved radar.

Wilkins was involved in improving the then primitive radar screens, when radar was being changed from a ponderous system into one small enough to fit in a cockpit.

Later he worked on uranium isotopes and then on the Manhattan Project, which led to the completion of the atomic bomb.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions led this private, self-effacing man to become a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and proud of his part in the campaign for nuclear disarmament. After the war he worked out his life on biophysics at King's College, London.

Francis Crick died in July. The remaining DNA Nobel winner, James Watson, described Wilkins this week as "a very intelligent scientist with a very deep personal concern that science be used to benefit society".

Wilkins' own biography The Third Man of the Double Helix was published last year. He is survived by his wife, Patricia, two sons and two daughters.