Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins (* December 15 1916 in Pongaroa, North Wairarapa, New Zealand; † 5 October 2004 in London) was a New Zealand physicist and conducted research mainly in the field of X-ray radiation.

At the age of six, he was brought to England. He studied physics at St John 's College, Cambridge University in 1940 and received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Birmingham. During World War II he worked in the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley, before he returned to King's College London.

Among other things, he went to King's College of the structural investigation by X-ray diffraction. His work and that of his colleague Rosalind Franklin by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 to derive the structure of DNA. He showed that the proposed of the two double-helix structure was actually correct. In 1960 he received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1962 and along with Watson and Crick, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The research history of Watson, Crick and Wilkins has been criticized for violating the rules of good scientific practice, since the publication in Nature in 1953 was based on the unauthorized acquisition of unpublished research by Rosalind Franklin. Watson and Crick came about Wilkins, the colleague of Franklin at King's College and was standing with her ​​on any good walk, without the knowledge of Franklin to the data. Watson reported this, that Wilkins and his assistant Wilson had secretly made ​​copies of Franklin's work.

Wilkins taught until his death at King 's College.

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