Maurice Wilkins, who shared the 1962 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with James Watson and Francis Crick, has died aged 87. He was still a member of staff at Kings College London, where he had earlier spent seven years verifying the hypothetical model constructed by Watson and Crick; work that, along with earlier research on X-ray diffraction, earned him his share in the prize.

Wilkins studied physics at St John's College, Cambridge, before moving on to postgraduate work on the luminescence of solids under John Randall at the University of Birmingham, UK. He completed his thesis on the theory of phosphorescence and the stability of trapped electrons in phosphors in 1940. During the war, Wilkins joined the Manhattan atom bomb project (later becoming an active member of the campaign for nuclear disarmament). After the war, Wilkins re-joined Randall's team at St Andrews University, before moving down to King's College London with them. There, he demonstrated the feasibility of using X-ray diffraction to solve the structure of DNA. In 1950, Wilkins' group obtained unprecedented images of the structure of DNA. This success was pivotal in several ways, says Adrian Hayday, professor of immunobiology at King's. It underpinned Randall's pursuit of X-rays to resolve the structure of DNA, to which effort he recruited Rosalind Franklin. And it galvanised the belief of the young American geneticist, Watson that were he to perform an unrelenting theoretical analysis of the emerging X-ray diffraction data, then the mysteries of life's code could be solved.

'The success of Watson and Crick in elucidating the DNA structure is universally known and acknowledged. But its complete dependence on the experimental results obtained, first by Wilkins, and then, most critically by Franklin, is still commonly overlooked,' said Hayday in a release from the college. Wilkins' autobiography, The third man of the double helix, was published last year.

Bea Perks