Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin

The discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 revealed the physical and chemical basis of how characteristics are passed down through the generations and how they are expressed in individual organisms.

Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, together with Ray Gosling, Alec Stokes and Herbert Wilson and other colleagues at the Randall Institute at King's, made crucial contributions to the discovery of DNA's structure in 1953.

Wilkins began using optical spectroscopy to study DNA in the late 1940s. In 1950 he and Gosling obtained the first clearly crystalline X-ray diffraction patterns from DNA fibres, and Alec Stokes suggested that the patterns indicated that DNA was helical (spiral) in structure.

Rosalind Franklin and 'Photo 51'

Rosalind Franklin came to King's in early 1951 and that summer she took the famous 'Photo 51' and made important studies of the DNA molecule. When Francis Crick and James Watson of Cambridge University obtained this photo, together with some of Franklin's data in the report of an MRC visit to King's, they were able to use this with their own deductions to build the first correct model of the DNA molecule. Their famous paper in Nature (April 1953) was accompanied by a paper by Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson, and another by Franklin and Gosling.

This was the beginning of a further seven years of work for Maurice Wilkins and his colleagues to check and verify Crick and Watson's hypothetical model. It was for this, as well as his original X-ray diffraction studies, that Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Watson in 1962. Rosalind Franklin died of cancer at the age of 37 in 1958.