4. Who is Maurice Wilkins?
Early life and career
Maurice Wilkins was born in 1916, moved to
Britain as a child from his native New Zealand and attended
King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and St John’s
College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in Physics
in 1938. He moved to Birmingham University where he was
research assistant under John Randall studying luminescence and
electron movement in crystals, obtaining his PhD in 1940 on the
thermal stability of trapped electrons in phosphors.
Wilkins
played an active part in World War Two, most notably in mass spectrography
of uranium isotopes and as part of the Manhattan Project to build the
first atomic bomb, an experience like those of many participants that
left him both with a life-long commitment to the peaceful use of science
and singular appreciation of the value of collaborative research in
the process of scientific discovery. Wilkins was reunited with John
Randall at St Andrews’ after the war when he became interested
in the emerging science of biophysics, in no small part due to a reading
of Erwin Schrodinger’s seminal What is Life?, a book that
had a profound influence upon a generation of scientists, including
Francis Crick.
