Maurice Wilkins - Biographical Maurice Wilkins The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins Share this: Maurice Wilkins - Biographical Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born at Pongaroa, New Zealand, on December 15th, 1916. His parents came from Ireland; his father Edgar Henry Wilkins was a doctor in the School Medical Service and was very interested in research but had little opportunity for it. At the age of 6, Wilkins was brought to England and educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. He studied physics at St. John's College, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1938. He then went to Birmingham University, where he became research assistant to Dr. J. T. Randall in the Physics Department. They studied the luminescence of solids. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1940, his thesis being mainly on a study of thermal stability of trapped electrons in phosphors, and on the theory of phosphorescence, in terms of electron traps with continuous distribution of trap depths.

He then applied these ideas to various war-time problems such as improvement of cathoderay tube screens for radar. Next he worked under Professor M. L. E. Oliphant on mass spectrograph separation of uranium isotopes for use in bombs and, shortly after, moved with others from Birmingham to the Manhattan Project in Berkeley, California, where these studies continued. In 1945, when the war was over, he was lecturer in physics at St. Andrews' University, Scotland, where Professor J. T. Randall was organizing biophysical studies. He had spent seven years in physics research and now began in biophysics. The biophysics project moved in 1946 to King's College, London, where he was a member of the staff of the newly formed Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit. He was first concerned with genetic effects of ultrasonics; after one or two years, he changed his research to development of reflecting microscopes for ultraviolet microspectrophotometric study of nucleic acids in cells.

He also studied the orientation of purines and pyrimidines in tobacco mosaic virus and in nucleic acids, by measuring the ultraviolet dichroism of oriented specimens, and he studied, with the visible-light polarizing microscope, the arrangement of virus particles in crystals of TMV and measured dry mass in cells with interference microscopes. He then began X-ray diffraction studies of DNA and sperm heads. The discovery of the well-defined patterns led to the deriving of the molecular structure of DNA. Further X-ray studies established the correctness of the Watson - Crick proposal for DNA structure. Relevant publications are «The molecular configuration of deoxyribonucleic acid. I. X-ray diffraction study of a crystalline form of the lithium salt», by R. Langridge, H. R. Wilson, C. W. Hooper, M. H. F. Wilkins, and L. D. Hamilton in J. Mol. Biol., 2 (1960) 19, and «Determination of the helical configuration of ribonucleic acid molecules by X-ray diffraction study of crystalline amino-acid-transfer ribonucleic acid», by M. Spencer, W. Fuller, M.

H. F. Wilkins, and G. L. Brown in Nature, 194 (1962) 1014. Wilkins became Assistant Director of the Medical Research Council Unit in 1950 and Deputy Director in 1955. A sub-department of Biophysics was formed in King's College, and he was made Honorary Lecturer in it. In 1961 a full Department of Biophysics was established. He was elected F.R.S. in 1959, given the Albert Lasker Award (jointly with Watson and Crick) by the American Public Health Association in 1960, and made Companion of the British Empire in 1962. He married Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959; they have a daughter Sarah and a son George. He finds his recreations in his collection of sculptures and in gardening. From Nobel Lectures , Physiology or Medicine 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel .

It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures . To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. For more updated biographical information, see: Wilkins, Maurice, The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003. Maurice Wilkins died on October 5, 2004. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 - Speed Read Speed Read The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 Francis Crick, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins Share this: Deciphering Life's Enigma Code In the mid-to-late 1940s, scientists began to suspect that the molecules that are responsible for heredity were not proteins, but in fact DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid. But how could a molecule long considered to be simple and inert hold the secret of life? The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, which helped solve one of the most important of all biological riddles.

Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin provided the key X-ray diffraction patterns that Watson and Crick used, as well as information from many other scientists, to build the definitive model of DNA's structure. The structure, as simple and elegant as it is profound, shows that two long strands of DNA run in opposite directions and spiral around one another in the shape of a double helix. Another vital element in the structure is that four organic bases – known as adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine – are paired in a specific manner between the two helices in such a way as to provide a natural scaffold for the two strands. Watson and Crick's structure of DNA could also explain how information is transferred in living material. The specific base pairing facilitates the perfect copying facility for heredity, while the specific order of bases forms the blueprint for the sequence of amino acids in a protein. DNA molecules can 'unzip' into two separate strands, and when the cell's machinery creates matching strands, the specific pairing between the bases ensures that you get two faithful copies where you had one before.

Watson and Crick's paper revealing the structure, published in Nature on 25 April 1953, contains perhaps one of scientific literature's most famous understatements: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." By Joachim Pietzsch , for Nobelprize.org New Nobel letters reveal secrets of DNA prize - Science Science New Nobel letters reveal secrets of DNA prize By Science Doctor Francis Crick's endorsement of the Nobel Prize check. By Stephanie Pappas LiveScience A new cache of letters released 50 years after Maurice Wilkins, Francis Crick and James Watson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's structure reveals that not everyone agreed on which prize the trio should receive. Wilkins, Crick and Watson ended up winning the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material," according to the official citation. But at least one scientist nominated them for the chemistry prize instead, researchers will report Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Nature first published a series of three papers describing the structure of DNA by the team on April 25, 1953, making this year the 60th anniversary of the discovery. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin (who died before the 1962 Nobel Prize was awarded) and their colleagues were the first to understand DNA's unique double-helix structure. [ Photos: Crick DNA Nobel On the Auction Block ] Nobel Prize puzzler Jan Witkowski and Alexander Gann of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York wrote to the Nobel committee to request the release of the nomination letters for the 1962 prize, as nomination letters are unsealed after 50 years. To their surprise, one letter seemed to be missing: That of Jacque Monod, a French biologist who would later win the Nobel Prize himself for research into the genetics of enzymes . "We were surprised because both Jim Watson and Francis Crick said that Monod was one of the people who nominated them," Witkowski told LiveScience. In fact, in 1961, Crick sent Monod a nine-page letter telling the story of the DNA structure discovery, at Monod's request.

Monod worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, so Witkowski and Gann turned to the Institute's archives to solve the puzzle of the missing nomination. There, they found Monod's nomination letter — only sent to an unexpected address. "It turns out that he nominated them for the chemistry prize, and not the medicine prize," Witkowski said. That's why the medicine or physiology committee had no record of the nomination, though the committees must have shared the nomination letters to decide which of the two prizes the DNA structure scientists should win. Third nominee The nomination letters also reveal that Franklin, who died in 1958, was never nominated for the Nobel Prize. There has been a lot of controversy over whether Franklin would have shared in the Nobel had she been alive in 1962, Witkowski said. (Nobels are not awarded posthumously.) Many have argued that Franklin's contributions were downplayed and overlooked by Watson and Crick. As it turns out, Franklin died two years before the DNA structure was first nominated for the Nobel, which occurred in 1960.

Wilkins, who did early work on DNA structure, was also not a major contender from the nominators' perspectives; of six nominations, not including Monod's, only one included Wilkins. Two others suggested that the committee might possibly include him, but didn't make a case for it. In his letter to Monod, Crick was insistent Wilkins should be nominated, however. "It could be that the nomination Monod wrote, following Crick's advice, where he strongly endorsed Wilkins may have helped sway the committee," Witkowski said. Another series of letters, these consisting of personal correspondence released in 2010, reveal that despite this nomination congeniality, there were professional rivalries between Watson and Crick and Wilkins — not to mention sexist attitudes toward Franklin. Another letter from Crick to his son explaining DNA went for a whopping $6 million at auction earlier this month. Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure By Mary Bagley, LiveScience Contributor | September 19, 2013 05:20pm ET MORE Rosalind Franklin Credit: National Institute of Health.

Many people recall that the structure of the DNA molecule has the shape of a double helix. Some may even recall the names of the scientists who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for modeling the structure of the molecule, and explaining how the shape lends itself to replication. James Watson and Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but many people feel that much of the credit for this world-shaking achievement should rightfully go to someone who was absent from that stage, a woman named Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, and grew up in a well-known Jewish family in pre-World War II London, and was known in the family for being very clever and outspoken. Her parents sent her to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, a private school known for rigorous academics, including physics and chemistry. In an interview for PBS’ NOVA television episode titled "The Secret of Photo 51," two of her friends recalled memories of Franklin’s school days. “She was best in science, best at maths, best in everything.

She expected that if she undertook to do something, she would be in charge of it.” By the age of 15, over objections from her father, who thought she should go into social work; Franklin decided to become a scientist. Franklin graduated from Newnham College at Cambridge in 1938 and took a job with the British Coal Utilization Research Association. She was determined to make a contribution to the war effort, and published several papers on the structures and uses of coal and graphite. Her work was used in development of the gas masks that helped keep British soldiers safer. Her work earned her a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry awarded by Cambridge University in 1945. In 1947, Franklin moved to Paris to take up a job at the Laboratoire Central working with Jacques Mering on perfecting the science of X-ray chromatography. By all accounts, she was very happy in Paris, easily earning the respect of her colleagues. She was known to enjoy doing the meticulous mathematical equations necessary to interpret data about atomic structure that was being revealed by the X-ray techniques. However, in 1951, she reluctantly decided it was necessary to move back to London to advance her scientific career.

Skirting a leftover bomb crater to enter the lab at King’s College in London, Franklin found she was expected to work with antiquated equipment in the basement of the building. She took charge of the lab with her customary efficiency, directing the graduate student, Raymond Gosling, in making needed refinements to the X-ray equipment. She was annoyed when she discovered that she was expected to interrupt her work and leave the building for lunch every day. Women were not allowed in the College cafeteria. Nevertheless, she and Gosling were making progress in studying DNA when Maurice Wilkins, another senior scientist, returned from his vacation. Wilkins was upset to learn that the female “assistant,” who he had expected would be working for him, was instead a formidable researcher in her own right. In this tense atmosphere, Franklin continued working to refine her X-ray images, using finer DNA fibers and arranging them differently for her chromatography, but she began to fear she had made a mistake in leaving Paris. Wilkins, also uncomfortable, began to spend more time at nearby Cavendish Laboratory with his friend Francis Crick. Crick and his partner, James Watson, were working on a model-based approach to trying to discover the structure of the DNA molecule.

Around this time, Franklin and Gosling made a startling discovery. There were two forms of DNA shown in the X-ray images, a dry “A” form and a wetter “B” form. Because each X-ray chromatograph had to be exposed for over 100 hours to form an image, and the drier “A” form seemed likelier to produce images in more detail, Franklin set aside the “B” form to study later. She noted that the “B” form images appeared to show a definite helical structure and that there were two clear strands visible in the image she labeled Photo 51 before she filed it away. Around this time, Franklin attended a conference given at Cavendish to observe an early DNA model being proposed by Watson and Crick. She was quite critical of their work, feeling that they were basing their model solely on conjecture whereas her own work was based on solid evidence. Her treatment of his friends widened the gap between her and Wilkins, leading to an even more strained relationship at King’s College.

Franklin was so unhappy that people in the lab began to talk behind her back calling her the “Dark Lady.” In 1953, she decided to move to Birkbeck College to escape King’s. Somehow, during the move, Wilkins came to be in possession of Franklin’s notes and the files containing Photo 51. Wilkins removed the photo from her records without her knowledge or permission and took it to show his friends at Cavendish. [ Related: 'Lost' Letters Reveal Twists in Discovery of Double Helix ] “My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson in his famous book, "The Double Helix." It was the one bit of information that he and Crick needed to complete an accurate model of the structure of DNA. Photo 51 was proof that DNA’s helical structure had two strands attached in the middle by the phosphate bases. They hurried to publish their findings in the journal Nature. The same issue of the journal published much shorter articles by Wilkins and Franklin, but placed them after the longer article by James Watson, seeming to imply that their work merely served to confirm the important discovery made by Watson and Crick rather than being integral to it.

Franklin, meanwhile, had moved on to Birkbeck. Part of the arrangement that allowed her to leave King’s was that she would not pursue any research on DNA, so she turned her talents to studying virus particles. Between 1953 and 1958, she made important discoveries about the tobacco mosaic virus and polio. The work done by Franklin and the other scientists at Birkbeck during this time laid the foundation of modern virology. Franklin died on April 16, 1958, of ovarian cancer, possibly caused by her extensive exposure to radiation while doing X-ray crystallography work. Because the Nobel Prize can only be shared among three living scientists, Franklin’s work was barely mentioned when it was awarded to Watson, Crick and Wilkins in 1962. By the time "The Double Helix" was written in 1968, Franklin was portrayed almost as a villain in the book. Watson describes her as a “belligerent, emotional woman unable to interpret her own data.” It is only in the past decade that Franklin’s contribution has been acknowledged and honored.

Today there are many new facilities, scholarships and research grants especially those for women, being named in her honor. Latest on Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure BBC - History - Historic Figures: Watson and Crick (1928- ) z James Watson and Francis Crick, 1959 © Crick and Watson, together with Maurice Wilkins, won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the structure of DNA. This was one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century. Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on 8 June 1916 near Northampton. He studied physics at University College, London, and during World War Two worked for the Admiralty on the development of mines. He changed from physics to biology and in 1947 began to work at Cambridge University. By 1949, he was working at the Medical Research Council unit at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In 1951, an American student, James Watson, arrived at the unit and the two began to work together.

James Dewey Watson was born on 6 April 1928 in Chicago and studied at the universities of Chicago, Indiana and Copenhagen. He then moved to Cambridge University. Watson and Crick worked together on studying the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the molecule that contains the hereditary information for cells. At that time Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, both working at King's College, London, were using X-ray diffraction to study DNA. Crick and Watson used their findings in their own research. In April 1953, they published the news of their discovery, a molecular structure of DNA based on all its known features - the double helix. Their model served to explain how DNA replicates and how hereditary information is coded on it. This set the stage for the rapid advances in molecular biology that continue to this day. Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962. Franklin had died in 1958 and, despite her key experimental work, the prize could not be received posthumously. Crick and Watson both received numerous other awards and prizes for their work.

Francis Crick continued to work in genetics and then moved into brain research, becoming a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. He died on 28 July 2004. From 1988 to 1992, James Watson directed the Human Genome Project at the American National Institutes of Health. He was instrumental in obtaining funding for the project and in encouraging cooperation between governments and leading scientists. Maurice Wilkins Maurice Wilkins Location of death: London, England Cause of death: unspecified Nationality: England Executive summary: Took X-ray pictures of DNA Maurice Wilkins was a British biophysicist best known for his contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA. X-ray diffraction pictures done by Wilkins and his assistant/co-worker Rosalind Franklin on the aligned fibers within DNA were seen by James Watson and Francis Crick who, incorporating what it revealed, were then able to build an accurate, detailed model of the DNA molecule. Wilkins, Watson, and Crick were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962.

As a graduate student, Wilkins's doctoral thesis had dealt with the study of the thermal stability of trapped electrons on phosphors, and on the theory of phosphorescence in terms of electron. Wilkins applied his research, during WWII, to improving cathode-ray tube screens for radar. He then worked for a time under Mark Oliphant (who had been Rutherford's deputy of research at Cambridge) studying the separation of isotopes in bombs. Not surprisingly, Wilkins and others in the research group were brought on board the Manhattan Project and moved all the way to Berkeley, California where they continued their research under the direction of Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer . After the horrifying success of the project, which resulted in the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Wilkins developed a very negative attitude toward nuclear weapons and resolved to go into "another branch of science, one with more positive applications." He returned to Britain, becoming a lecturer in Physics at St. Andrew's University in Scotland where he worked in biophysics, seeking to utilize X-ray crystallography in biological research. It was here, in 1950, that Wilkins and Raymond Gosling took the first ever images of the DNA molecule.

Two years later, with Rosalind Franklin on the team, the famous image was produced. Watson and Crick published their resultant work in 1953. In 1955 Wilkins was promoted to Deputy Director of the Medical Research Council Unit. He was appointed Honorary Lecturer to a newly formed sub-department of Biophysics at King's College, and in 1961 a full Department of Biophysics was established. In 1959 he married, to Patricia Ann Chidgey. They had two children, a daughter Sarah and a son George. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Wilkins was awarded the Albert Lasker Award (also jointly with Watson and Crick) by the American Public Health Association in 1960. In 1962 he was made Companion of the British Empire.

Father: Edgar Henry Wilkins (doctor) Daughter: Sarah Wilkins Maurice Wilkins - Telegraph Maurice Wilkins 12:03AM BST 07 Oct 2004 Maurice Wilkins, the molecular biologist who died on Tuesday aged 87, was the third and least well-known of the three scientists who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize for medicine for determining the structure of DNA, the molecule which carries the genetic code that makes possible the transfer of inherited characteristics in all living things. More reticent than his fellow prizewinners, Francis Crick and James Watson, Wilkins's contribution also tended to be overshadowed in the public mind by that of his colleague at King's College, London, Rosalind Franklin. James Watson had painted a highly unflattering portrait of Rosalind Franklin in his book about the discovery, The Double Helix (1968). She had died of cancer in 1958 and could not defend herself, but others rose to the challenge on her behalf. In the ensuing public row, Maurice Wilkins's vital part in the story was almost forgotten. Yet without him, it is doubtful whether the breakthrough would have taken place.

He had become interested in the structure of DNA long before Crick, Watson or Franklin appeared on the scene. When in 1946 American scientists announced that genes, long known as the units inside living cells which transmit hereditary characteristics, were made up of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, Wilkins was then working as a research scientist in the Medical Research Council's biophysics unit at King's College. He wondered whether it would be possible to discover the exact structure of the molecule and began to study DNA molecules under the microscope by illuminating them with one colour of transmitted light and another of reflected light. It was his customary procedure to place his samples in a gel and to orient them under the microscope with a glass rod. After a while, he noticed that whenever he removed the rod from the gel, a thin fibre would trail from its tip; he wondered whether these fibres could be used for analysis by X-ray diffraction techniques. Commandeering the department's X-ray machine, he began to take photographs of X-rays bounced off his DNA samples and found that they produced patterns indicative of a regular structure. In 1951, Wilkins gave a talk about his work at a scientific meeting in Naples.

In the audience was a young American biologist James Watson who was on the lookout for some more promising field of scientific research. Wilkins gave Watson the lead he was looking for: "Maurice's X-ray diffraction picture of DNA was flicked on the screen near the end of his talk," Watson recalled. "Suddenly I was excited about chemistry. Before Maurice's talk, I had worried about the possibility that the gene might be fantastically irregular. Now, however, I knew that genes could crystallise; hence they must have a regular structure that could be solved in a straightforward fashion. I immediately began wondering whether I could join Wilkins in working on DNA." Watson introduced himself to Wilkins the next day and the two men were joined by Watson's sister Elizabeth who had just flown in from America. To Watson's delight, Wilkins seemed to find her attractive: "If Maurice really liked my sister, it was inevitable that I would become closely associated with his X-ray work on DNA." But his daydreams came to nothing: "Neither the beauty of my sister nor my interest in DNA structure had snared him.

Our futures did not seem to be in London." Watson proceeded to forget Wilkins, but not his photographs, and it was another year before the two men met again. By that time, Watson had teamed up with Francis Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to do theoretical work on the structure of DNA. But by 1952, the problem as it appeared to Watson was not so much that "DNA was, for all practical purposes, the personal property of Maurice Wilkins", but that Wilkins had acquired a new laboratory assistant. Rosalind Franklin was a trained crystallographer who had been taken on by Wilkins in the hope that she could help him speed up his research. But, according to Watson, she had other ideas: "From the moment she arrived in Maurice's lab, they began to upset each other . . . She claimed she had been given DNA for her own problem and would not think of herself as Maurice's assistant. Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place . . .

Unfortunately Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot." In order to keep Franklin happy, Wilkins had allowed her to take over all the good crystalline DNA used in his original work, while he himself turned his attention to other DNA which he found did not crystallise. However, the animosity between them seemed to make Wilkins more benevolently inclined towards the two Cambridge men. One day, by Watson's account, Wilkins turned up in the nick of time to prevent him being physically assaulted by Franklin, after he had cast doubt on her ability to interpret her own data. "Now that I need no longer merely imagine the emotional hell he had faced during the past two years," Watson observed, "he could treat me almost as a fellow collaborator rather than a distant acquaintance." To cement their new friendship, Wilkins showed him a new photograph which Rosalind Franklin had taken: "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race . . . The black cross of reflections which dominated the picture could only arise from a helical structure." It was the breakthrough Watson needed.

Within a few weeks he and Crick had succeeded in piecing together a model of the double helix DNA molecule which was consistent with the evidence. Watson was concerned about how Wilkins would react to the discovery that he and Crick had "seized part of the glory that should have gone to him", but he need not have worried. Wilkins was part of a very different scientific culture. "There was no trace of resentment on his face, and in his subdued way he was thoroughly excited that the structure would prove of great benefit to biology." After their discovery, Wilkins refined his X-ray techniques and added experimental confirmation of the Crick-Watson model. But while Francis Crick proclaimed that they had discovered "the secret of life," Wilkins, who hated overstatement, seemed determined to downplay their achievement. In the first draft of his Nobel Prize lecture he had written: "Nucleic acids are very remarkable." On second thoughts, he crossed out the word "very". Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born at Pongaroa, New Zealand, on December 15 1916 to Irish parents; his father was a school doctor.

At the age of six, he was sent to England where he attended King Edward's School, Birmingham. He went on to St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. At the outbreak of war, Wilkins was sent by the Ministry of Home Security and Aircraft Production to Birmingham to work under Sir John Randall on the improvement of radar screens. His studies on the luminescence of solids and on the electron trap theory of phosphorescence earned him a doctorate in 1940. Subsequently, Wilkins joined the team under Sir Marcus Oliphant working on the separation of uranium isotopes for atomic bombs. Later he joined the Manhattan Project at the University of California at Berkeley where he made mass spectrograph studies of the separation of uranium isotopes. But Wilkins had become increasingly concerned at the ethical implications of atomic weapons research and during the war began to contemplate changing his field of specialisation to biophysics. In 1945, he became a lecturer in physics at St Andrew's, but a year later he joined the cell biophysics unit of the Medical Research Council at King's College, London.

He remained at King's, becoming professor of biophysics and director of the cell biophysics unit in 1970, and director of the neurobiology unit in 1972. After winning the Nobel Prize, Wilkins continued to work on the problem of ribonucleic acid (a substance closely related to DNA). Later he turned his attention to the organisation and operation of nervous systems. From the 1960s onwards, he became a prominent campaigner against the involvement of scientists in weapons research. A member of the Russell committee against chemical weapons, in 1968 he led a campaign to stop the proliferation of biological weapons and demanded that the work of the government's germ warfare centre at Porton Down, Wiltshire, be made public. THe next year, with Professor Cecil Powell, he co-founded the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science and served as the society's president from 1969 to 1991. He was president of Food and Disarmament International from 1984. In 1989 he signed a declaration drawn up by Greenpeace rejecting nuclear power.

In later life, Wilkins spent much time on Corsica, where he had bought a house in 1962. But in 1993 the house was reduced to ashes after an attack by separatist gangs seeking to damage the island's tourist industry. Wilkins remained a professor at King's College until the day he died. Last year he took an active role in the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of Crick and Watson's breakthrough at Cambridge University. Maurice Wilkins was appointed CBE in 1963 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959. He married, in 1959, Patricia Chidgey; they had two sons and two daughters. James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin | Chemical Heritage Foundation Search James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin These four scientists—Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins—codiscovered the double-helix structure of DNA, which formed the basis for modern biotechnology.

Home / Learn / Historical Biographies At King’s College London, Rosalind Franklin obtained images of DNA using X-ray crystallography, an idea first broached by Maurice Wilkins. Franklin’s images allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to create their famous two-strand, or double-helix, model. In 1962 Watson (b. 1928), Crick (1916–2004), and Wilkins (1916–2004) jointly received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their 1953 determination of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Wilkins’s colleague Franklin (1920–1958), who died from cancer at the age of 37, was not so honored because the Nobel Prize can be awarded only to the living. Discovering the Structure of DNA The molecule that is the basis for heredity, DNA, contains the patterns for constructing proteins in the body, including the various enzymes.

A new understanding of heredity and hereditary disease was possible once it was determined that DNA consists of two chains twisted around each other, or double helixes, of alternating phosphate and sugar groups, and that the two chains are held together by hydrogen bonds between pairs of organic bases—adenine (A) with thymine (T), and guanine (G) with cytosine (C). Modern biotechnology also has its basis in the structural knowledge of DNA—in this case the scientist’s ability to modify the DNA of host cells that will then produce a desired product, for example, insulin. The background for the work of the four scientists was formed by several scientific breakthroughs: the progress made by X-ray crystallographers in studying organic macromolecules; the growing evidence supplied by geneticists that it was DNA, not protein, in chromosomes that was responsible for heredity; Erwin Chargaff’s experimental finding that there are equal numbers of A and T bases and of G and C bases in DNA; and Linus Pauling ’s discovery that the molecules of some proteins have helical shapes—arrived at through the use of atomic models and a keen knowledge of the possible disposition of various atoms. Courtesy Vittorio Luzzati.

Rosalind Franklin Of the four DNA researchers, only Rosalind Franklin had any degrees in chemistry. She was born into a prominent London banking family, where all the children—girls and boys—were encouraged to develop their individual aptitudes. She attended Newnham College, one of the women’s colleges at Cambridge University. She completed her degree in 1941 in the middle of World War II and undertook graduate work at Cambridge with Ronald Norrish, a future Nobel laureate. She resigned her research scholarship in just one year to contribute to the war effort at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. There she performed fundamental investigations on the properties of coal and graphite. She returned briefly to Cambridge, where she presented a dissertation based on this work and was granted a PhD in physical chemistry. After the war, through a French friend, she gained an appointment at the Laboratoire Centrale des Services Chimiques de l’Etat in Paris, where she was introduced to the technique of X-ray crystallography (see video on this page) and rapidly became a respected authority in this field.

In 1951 she returned to England to King’s College London, where her charge was to upgrade the X-ray crystallographic laboratory there for work with DNA. Video of Viewing History through the Corrective Lenses of the Spectrophotometry and X-Ray Crystallography History through Spectrophotometry and X-Ray Crystallography explains how these instruments help understand structure of atoms. Maurice Wilkins Maurice Wilkins with X-ray crystallographic equipment about 1954. Courtesy King’s College London and Horace Freeland Judson. Already at work at King’s College was Maurice Wilkins, a New Zealand–born but Cambridge-educated physicist. As a new PhD he worked during World War II on the improvement of cathode-ray tube screens for use in radar and then was shipped out to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project. Like many other nuclear physicists, he became disillusioned with his subject when it was applied to the creation of the atomic bomb; he turned instead to biophysics, working with his Cambridge mentor, John T. Randall—who had undergone a similar conversion—first at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and then at King’s College London.

It was Wilkins’s idea to study DNA by X-ray crystallographic techniques, which he had already begun to implement when Franklin was appointed by Randall. The relationship between Wilkins and Franklin was unfortunately a poor one and probably slowed their progress. James Watson and Francis Crick Meanwhile, in 1951, 23-year-old James Watson, a Chicago-born American, arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Watson had two degrees in zoology: a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from Indiana University, where he became interested in genetics. He had worked under Salvador E. Luria at Indiana on bacteriophages, the viruses that invade bacteria in order to reproduce—a topic for which Luria received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969. Watson went to Denmark for postdoctoral work, to continue studying viruses and to remedy his relative ignorance of chemistry. At a conference in the spring of 1951 at the Zoological Station at Naples, Watson heard Wilkins talk on the molecular structure of DNA and saw his recent X-ray crystallographic photographs of DNA. He was hooked.

James Watson and Francis Crick with their DNA model at the Cavendish Laboratories in 1953. To request permission to use this photo, please visit the Science Photo Library website at . © A. Barrington Brown. Watson soon moved to the Cavendish Laboratory, where several important X-ray crystallographic projects were in progress. Under the leadership of William Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz was investigating hemoglobin and John Kendrew was studying myoglobin, a protein in muscle tissue that stores oxygen. (Perutz and Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in the same year that the prize was awarded to the DNA researchers—1962.) Working under Perutz was Francis Crick, who had earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from University College London and had helped develop radar and magnetic mines during World War II. Crick, another physicist in biology, was supposed to be writing a dissertation on the X-ray crystallography of hemoglobin when Watson arrived, eager to recruit a colleague for work on DNA. Inspired by Pauling’s success in working with molecular models, Watson and Crick rapidly put together several models of DNA and attempted to incorporate all the evidence they could gather.

Franklin’s excellent X-ray photographs, to which they had gained access without her permission, were critical to the correct solution. The four scientists announced the structure of DNA in articles that appeared together in the same issue of Nature. Separate Career Paths Then they moved off in different directions. Franklin went to Birkbeck College, London, to work in J. D. Bernal’s laboratory, a much more congenial setting for her than King’s College. Before her untimely death from cancer she made important contributions to the X-ray crystallographic analysis of the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, a landmark in the field. By the end of her life she had become friends with Francis Crick and his wife and had moved her laboratory to Cambridge, where she undertook dangerous work on the poliovirus. Wilkins applied X-ray techniques to the structural determination of nerve cell membranes and of ribonucleic acid (RNA)—a molecule that is associated with chemical synthesis in the living cell—while rising in rank and responsibility at King’s College.

Watson’s subsequent career eventually took him to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) of Quantitative Biology on Long Island, New York, where as director from 1968 onward he led it to new heights as a center of research in molecular biology. From 1988 to 1992 he headed the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health. Afterward he returned to CSHL, from which he retired in 2007. During Crick’s long tenure at Cambridge, he made fundamental contributions to unlocking the genetic code. He and Sydney Brenner demonstrated that each group of three adjacent bases on a single DNA strand codes for one specific amino acid. He also correctly hypothesized the existence of “transfer” RNA, which mediates between “messenger” RNA and amino acids. After 20 years at Cambridge, with several visiting professorships in the United States, Crick joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

Further Recognition In 2005 James Watson was honored with the Othmer Gold Medal from CHF, for his scientific talent, which has given the world a new intellectual understanding of the nature of life, making possible modern biotechnology and a better life for all mankind. Visit the Museum at CHF to learn more about these four scientists. The information contained in this biography was last updated on July 22, 2015. CHF Awards NOVA - Official Website | Rosalind Franklin's Legacy NOVA Posted 04.22.03 NOVA When it comes to her place in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin has not received fair treatment. Or so maintains Lynne Osman Elkin, a professor of biological sciences at California State University, Hayward, who spends much of her time these days trying to clarify Franklin's significant role in one of the 20th century's greatest scientific achievements. In March 2003, Elkin published a lengthy article on Franklin in Physics Today , and she's hard at work on a biography.

In this interview, hear what Elkin has to say about exactly where Franklin stands in her mind—and where Photo 51's creator ought to stand in the history books. Click on highlighted words or phrases for a glossary. With all she did to make Watson and Crick's discovery possible, Rosalind Franklin was essentially "a de facto collaborator," says Lynne Osman Elkin. Enlarge Photo credit: © Novartis Foundation Within reach NOVA: How close did Franklin actually come to deciphering the structure of DNA? Elkin: She was very close. She had all the parameters of the helical backbone . She was the one who figured out that there were two forms of DNA , which made solving the whole structure possible. She had figured out that backbone of the A form is antiparallel . It wouldn't have been very long before she figured out that the B form backbone was antiparallel as well. The other thing was base-pairing , which was Watson 's brilliant idea, made possible by chemical information supplied by Jerry Donohue . But if you look at her notebooks, she was very, very aware of hydrogen bonding .

She was very, very aware of the difference between enol and keto forms , which were the key to base-pairing. She was aware of Chargaff's ratios . She was aware of Donohue's work. All the stuff that circled around base-pairing. How soon might she have worked it out if Watson and Crick hadn't gotten her data? Well, at one time Crick estimated that it would have taken her three months. I don't know how long it would have taken her, but I think the critical thing with the timing is that she was about to publish her paper on the B form. That's the March 17th draft that Aaron Klug discovered. And that paper was written well before March 17th, and then after the Watson-Crick structure was figured out, she modified it very minimally, and it became the third Nature paper. "After Watson saw Photo 51, he went out to dinner with Maurice Wilkins and pressed him for the interpretation of it." There is no way without her data that Watson and Crick could have figured out the structure before [her March 17th draft] got published.

Now, if that had gotten published first and then they figured it out—remember, she talked about the double helix in that paper—then even though they had figured out the actual structure, they would have had to incorporate her information and credit her properly, and she would not have been written out of history. Franklin's famous Photo 51, which led to Watson and Crick's breakthrough insight into the double-helical structure of DNA Enlarge Photo credit: © Franklin, R. and Gosling, R.G./Nature Picture perfect What did Watson actually get out of Photo 51 beyond the idea that the "X" signified a helix? After Watson saw Photo 51, he went out to dinner with Wilkins and pressed him for the interpretation of it—the 34-angstrom measurements and so on. At that early date Watson didn't know how to interpret a diffraction photo, other than that an "X" meant helix. In terms of getting measurements out of it, he hadn't the foggiest—at that point. It was Wilkins who told him how to interpret it.

[For a closer look at the image, see Anatomy of Photo 51 .] What about the idea that the sugar-phosphate groups were on the outside? Did Watson get that from Photo 51? No. That was from the MRC report . Watson and Crick got a tremendous amount of information from that MRC report. Now, they persisted in wanting to put the bases on the outside. And it's absurd—you don't put a hydrophobic thing on the outside of a structure in a cell. You put the hydrophobic stuff on the inside where it's protected, and the hydrophilic phosphates and sugars on the outside. As a chemist Franklin knew that automatically, and so did even a graduate student at King's, Bruce Fraser, when he tried building a model. But Watson and Crick, being weak in their knowledge of chemistry, kept putting it on the outside. And Wilkins said, "You know, Rosalind said it should be on the inside." So Wilkins once again was telling them information that he knew from Rosalind. They kept resisting, however, because to put it on the inside, it seemed very difficult to know how to pack things.

But when Crick saw the MRC report—in which Franklin had not only said that the phosphates are on the outside but had offered measurements of the interphosphate distances—even he couldn't argue with that anymore. So when Watson once again was trying to build a model and it wasn't working, Crick said, "Why don't you put the phosphates on the outside, like Rosalind said?" Of Franklin and the Nobel Prize she never won, Elkin points out that "even Watson begrudgingly says that she should have gotten it." Enlarge Photo credit: © Corbis Images Great potential So the big question is, if Franklin had lived, would she or should she, instead of Wilkins, have received the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick? There's a big difference between "would" and "should." Should she have? Absolutely. One of the things I proposed last year at AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting] is that I think it should be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin structure. As far as I'm concerned, she was a de facto collaborator. Maybe she didn't give them her information directly.

But every time they hit a stumbling point, it was her information that they got from Wilkins that straightened it out. So do I think should she have? Absolutely. Would she have? I'm not so sure. The Nobel Prize could be very political, and often the Nobel Committee would put great emphasis on those who started the research, which in this case was Wilkins. But even Watson begrudgingly says that she should have gotten it. "I considered her a genius, and I don't use that word lightly." Do you believe Franklin had good intuition and that her careful science held her back from making big leaps of imagination, such as might have brought her to the structure of DNA faster than Watson and Crick? I don't think she had the intuition of someone like Crick or Dorothy Hodgkin , maybe not even of Watson. But she had very good intuition, and she could interpret her own data. She could see things, but unless she could prove them, she wouldn't publish them. Now, from my point of view, being careful before you publish is a good thing. I've never considered that a liability. I think that's an asset.

For someone of her age [Franklin died at age 37], her publication record was phenomenal. It would be phenomenal if she had retired at the age of 75. Franklin, seen here serving coffee in evaporating dishes at her Parisian laboratory in the late 1940s, went on to publish an impressive array of scientific papers in the decade she had remaining to her. Enlarge Photo credit: © Rachel Glaeser/American Society for Microbiology You see, what Watson and Crick did was they guessed. They had intuition, their work was brilliant, they guessed. But there were things wrong with the structure they proposed that had to be refined by Wilkins. So it's a double-edged sword. I don't think she had intuition to the level of Crick, but I think very few people in the world ever have had intuition to the level of Crick. Crick and Linus Pauling were in a class by themselves. Franklin would be 79 now if she had lived. What might she have accomplished in her career? Was she on a trajectory to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist in her own right? Oh, sure.

I think she would have ended up doing the virus work, probably with Klug, and they probably would have shared a Nobel Prize for that work. That would be the most obvious thing. Lord knows what else she would have done. If one looks in the records, in all the archives, the way people talked about her was phenomenal. One of the coal researchers wrote a letter about her to Bernal after she died, and in that letter he said, "I considered her a genius, and I don't use that word lightly." She was so young and so brilliant, and she wasn't the kind of person who pooped out. She just gained acceleration and quality in her work as she got older. Lynne Osman Elkin first started researching Rosalind Franklin in 1997, in connection with a course she was teaching on women in science. Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy of Lynne Osman Elkin Cut short Do you think her X-ray work contributed to the ovarian cancer that killed her? I think for sure, though there's no knowing one way or the other. For one thing, she probably had the ovarian cancer gene. I know that there's cancer in the family. But she was also in the X-ray beam a lot.

Gosling talked to me about that. When they were physically putting the X-ray diffraction device together, they had practical difficulties. He said he would be lying on the floor holding the apparatus together, and she would spend hours adjusting the specimen. He thought, "Gee, she's in that X-ray beam an awfully long time," because the beam had to be on to do the adjustments. So is there proof of it? No. Do all X-ray crystallographers end up with cancer? No. I don't think most of them spend as much time aligning the specimen as she did. And she didn't wear lead aprons. It was just beginning to be thought that you ought to do stuff like that. So did she know that it was potentially dangerous? It was beginning to be thought that it would be, but I don't think a lot of them took it seriously. I got to know Anne and David Sayre very well. Anne told me an anecdote about how she came to have lunch with David one day, and there was this X-ray source sitting on his desk.

Anne was very, very well-read, and she said, "You put that thing in a lead box, or I'm divorcing you tomorrow." David is healthy as a horse today. At any rate, I know a lot of old crystallographers, so it's not an automatic thing, and it depends on how much you handle the specimen. I think the combination of the specimens and the gene did Rosalind Franklin in. Glossary antiparallel: parallel but upside down with respect to each other base-pairing: In a key insight on the road to discovering DNA's structure, Watson figured out that the four basic chemicals in DNA paired up as follows: adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. John Desmond Bernal: An acclaimed crystallographer, Bernal was head of the physics department at Birkbeck College when Franklin joined the staff in March 1953. It was Bernal who wrote Franklin's obituaries. Chargaff's ratios: Regarding DNA's base pairs , Erwin Chargaff discovered in 1952 that the total amount of adenine and guanine always equaled the total amount of thymine and cytosine.

coal researchers: Franklin worked on the molecular structure of coal early in her career. Francis Crick: Co-discoverer, with James Watson , of the structure of DNA. Jerry Donohue: Chemist sharing an office with Watson and Crick who suggested to Watson that he try modeling DNA with the enol rather than keto forms of the base pairs . enol and keto forms: The four chemical bases come in two forms, enol and keto, each of which makes an oxygen atom available for bonding in a different position. Franklin-Wilkins Building: Part of King's College London, where Franklin and Maurice Wilkins worked on the structure of DNA, this is the home of the college's Department of Pharmacy. Opened in 2000, it provides teaching and research facilities for 4,500 students. Raymond Gosling: A doctoral candidate at King's College London, Gosling assisted Franklin in her X-ray diffraction work. helical backbone: The basic structure, or scaffolding, of DNA is a double helix. Dorothy Hodgkin: A crystallographer, Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964.

hydrogen bonding: DNA's four chemical bases are bonded together by hydrogen atoms. Aaron Klug: Chemist who collaborated with Franklin on her virus work in the mid-1950s. Klug received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1982. March 17th draft: Written in March, 1953, by Franklin, this paper summarized Franklin's findings about the double-helix backbone in the B form of DNA. It was published alongside Watson and Crick 's famous paper in the April 25th, 1953, issue of Nature. MRC report: Franklin's portion of a 1952 Medical Research Council report inspired Watson and Crick to cease trying to put the bases on the outside of their burgeoning model of DNA. Linus Pauling: The foremost chemist of his day, Pauling was trying to determine the structure of DNA at the same time as Watson and Crick . Pauling is the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes—chemistry in 1954 and peace in 1962.

Anne and David Sayre: Anne Sayre published a biography of her good friend Franklin in 1975 (Rosalind Franklin and DNA, Norton). David Sayre, her husband, is a crystallographer. sugar-phosphate groups: DNA's backbone is made up of sugar-phosphate groups to which the four bases adhere and point toward the helical axis. 34-angstrom measurements: Crystallographer William Astbury determined that DNA's base pairs lay flat, 3.4 angstroms apart, and that the distance between each turn of the helix is 34 angstroms. two forms of DNA: Franklin discovered that DNA comes in two forms, which she labeled "A" and "B." James Watson: Co-discoverer, with Francis Crick , of the structure of DNA. Maurice Wilkins: A physicist at King's College London who was Franklin's immediate boss when she worked there. Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Watson and Crick in 1962. X-ray work: Franklin used X-ray diffraction techniques to study the structure of DNA. This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Secret of Photo 51 .

Interview of Lynn Osman Elkin conducted on March 26, 2003 and edited by Peter Tyson, editor in chief of NOVA Online Further Reading James Watson :: DNA from the Beginning Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) James Watson (1928-) James Dewey Watson was born in Chicago. As a child, he was bright and inquisitive. One of his favorite words was "why?" and he wasn't satisfied with simple answers. He accumulated a lot of knowledge by reading the World Almanac, and won $100 as a "Quiz Kid" on a popular radio program. He used this money to buy binoculars for bird-watching ? a serious hobby for himself and his father. Watson entered the University of Chicago at 15 under the gifted youngster program. He did well in courses that interested him, like biology and zoology, and not as well in other courses. He decided that he would go to graduate school and study to become the curator of ornithology at the Museum of Natural History . In his senior year at Chicago, Watson read Erwin Schrödinger's book: What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.

He was fascinated by the idea that genes and chromosomes hold the secrets of life. When Watson went to do a Ph.D. with Salvador Luria , a pioneer in bacteriophage research, at Indiana University , it seemed the perfect opportunity to work on some of these problems. After his Ph.D. in 1950, Watson spent time in Europe, first in Copenhagen and then at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge . By now, Watson knew that DNA was the key to understanding life and he was determined to solve its structure. He was lucky to share an office with Francis Crick , a Ph.D. student who was also interested in the structure of DNA. Although both were supposed to be working on other projects, in 1953, they built the first accurate model of DNA ? one of the great scientific advances of all time. In 1962, Watson shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins who, with Rosalind Franklin, provided the data on which the structure was based. Watson wrote The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, which was published in 1968.

This book was the first of its kind, being a gossipy account of the inner workings of the scientific world, and has never been out of print. In 1956, Watson accepted a position in the Biology department at Harvard University where the focus of his research was RNA and its role in the transfer of genetic information. Although he continued to be a member of the Harvard faculty until 1976, Watson took over the directorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968. Watson has had a long association with Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück taught a popular summer course on phage genetics, and during his graduate days, Watson enjoyed this "summer camp" for scientists. Watson has made Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory one of the world's premier research facilities for cancer, neurobiology, and basic molecular genetics. Watson retired as the President of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2004, and is now Chancellor Emeritus . Watson has played a significant role in the development of science policy, from the War on Cancer, through the debates over the use of recombinant DNA, to promoting the Human Genome Project.

From 1988 to 1992, he ran the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health while still directing Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. One of his major interests is education. His first textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene, set new standards for biology textbooks, and it was followed by Molecular Biology of the Cell, and Recombinant DNA. He is actively exploring the avenue of multimedia education and the WWW through projects being developed at the DNA Learning Center , the educational arm of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He was and is one of the main motivators of this project, DNA from the Beginning. Watson has been described by many as brilliant, outspoken and eccentric. He is energized by intelligent people and doesn't suffer fools. Watson is an avid tennis player and has been ever since his grad school days. He still tries to play tennis every day. DNA was first crystallized in the late 70's — remember, the 1953 X-ray data were from DNA fibers. So, the real "proof" for the Watson-Crick model of DNA came in 1982 after the B-form of DNA was crystallized and the X-ray pattern was solved.

If the DNA of one human cell is stretched out, it would be almost 6 feet long and contain over three billion base pairs. How does all this fit into the nucleus of one cell?

Question: In 1962, Maurice Wilkins and two others won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of what?
Answer: Structure of DNA