Wilkins, Maurice

Wilkins, Maurice (Hugh Frederick)

(born Dec. 15, 1916, Pongaroa, N.Z.—died Oct. 6, 2004, London, Eng.) New Zealand-born British biophysicist. Educated in Birmingham and Cambridge, he participated in the Manhattan Project, working on the separation of uranium isotopes for use in the atomic bomb. On his return to Britain, he began a series of investigations that led ultimately to his studies of DNA. His X-ray diffraction studies of DNA proved crucial to the determination of DNA's molecular structure by James D. Watson and Francis Crick, for which the three were awarded a 1962 Nobel Prize. He later applied X-ray diffraction techniques to the study of RNA. See also Rosalind Franklin.