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Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins (born December 15,
1916) was a physicist who mainly worked in the field of X-rays.
Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, north
Wairarapa, New Zealand.
Brought to England at age six, he studied physics at St. John's College, Cambridge, then in 1940 received his Ph.D. in physics at Birmingham University. During World War II he worked on the Manhattan
Project at the University of California, Berkeley before returning to King's College, London.
At King's College he pursued, among other things X-ray diffraction work. It was his
work, along with that of his assistant Rosalind Franklin that led
James D. Watson and Francis Crick to deduce the structure of DNA in 1953; he went on to prove that the double-helical
structure they proposed was indeed correct.
In 1962 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick. He remains at King's
College.
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