Page 162 - Big Ideas Year 10 sciPAD 2025

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162 SCIPAD - BIG IDEAS - BOOK 2
THE BASIS OF HEREDITY
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Maurice Wilkins CBE FRS
(15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004)
The 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded jointly to Francis
Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the
structure of DNA.
Maurice Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, in the southeast of the North
Island, but emigrated to England when he was 6.
He obtained a PhD in 1940 from Birmingham University.
Wilkins worked on the development of radar during World War II,
and was a member of the Manhattan Project (which resulted in the
development of the first atomic bomb).
The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 is widely regarded as
the most significant discovery in biology of the 20th century. Its
discovery is almost always credited to Francis Crick and James
Watson, working in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. However, it was Wilkins, along with Rosalind
Franklin and colleagues at King’s College London, who had discovered the data on which the model was based.
In 1953, Watson and Crick visited Wilkins and Franklin and read their research papers which included useful
information about features of DNA they had deduced from their research.
Watson and Crick published their proposed structure of DNA in a paper in the journal ‘Nature’ in April 1953. In
this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been “stimulated by unpublished results and ideas” of
Wilkins and Franklin.
By this time Franklin was suffering from cancer of the ovary. She died in 1958, and because Nobel Prizes are not
awarded posthumously (i.e. to people who are dead) she was not included in the 1962 Nobel Prize.
The Encylopedia of Nobel Prize Winners
1. Between 1940 and 1945, what projects was Wilkins involved in? 

2. What is regarded as the most significant biological discovery of the 20th century? 

3. How, and when, did Watson and Crick tell other scientists about their idea? 

4. Outline why Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded a Nobel Prize, but Rosalind Franklin
was not. 


Famous New Zealand Scientists - Maurice Wilkins
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