Overview

Francis Crick and Jim Watson are well known for their discovery of the structure of DNA in Cambridge in 1953. But they shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Double Helix with a third man, Maurice Wilkins, a diffident physicist who did not enjoy the limelight. He and his team at King's College London had painstakingly measured the angles, bonds, and orientations of the DNA structure - data that inspired Crick and Watson's celebrated model - and they then spent many years demonstrating that Crick and Watson were right before the Prize was awarded in 1962. Wilkins's career had already embraced another momentous and highly controversial scientific achievement - he had worked during World War II on the atomic bomb project - and he was to face a new controversy in the 1970s when his co-worker at King's, the late Rosalind Franklin, was proclaimed the unsung heroine of the DNA story, and he was accused of exploiting her work. Now aged 86, Maurice Wilkins marks the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Double Helix by telling, for the first time, his own story of the discovery of the DNA structure and his relationship with Rosalind Franklin.

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9780198606659

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Maurice Wilkins is Emeritus Professor at King's College London, and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Watson for the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA.

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