Maurice Wilkins

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, but his family moved to England when he was 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 colleague 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.