Maurice Wilkins died in London on 5 October 2004, aged 87. The British biophysicist played an important experimental role in research that established DNA’s double-helix structure.

Wilkins was born in New Zealand in 1916 but moved to England with his family as a child. He studied physics at Cambridge and Birmingham, worked on radar research during the Second World War, and later joined the Manhattan Project in the United States.

After the war, Wilkins moved into biophysics and joined King’s College London. There, he and graduate student Raymond Gosling used X-ray diffraction to investigate DNA and produced images showing features of its structure. Rosalind Franklin joined King’s in 1951 and continued X-ray diffraction work on DNA.

Experimental evidence produced at King’s contributed to James Watson and Francis Crick’s double-helix model in 1953. Wilkins continued experimental work on DNA and helped test the proposed structure in the years that followed.

In 1962, Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick for discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and their significance in transferring information in living material.

Wilkins remained at King’s for the rest of his career and was still an emeritus professor there when he died.