Maurice Wilkins - DNA enabler
The story of the DNA double helix has become part of our scientific folklore – and
New Zealander Maurice Wilkins was one of the key figures in those exciting
times.
Wilkins’ research, with support from Rosalind Franklin, led to the discovery
in 1953 by American geneticist James Watson and British biophysicist Francis
Crick of the structure of DNA - surely one of the truly defining moments of
twentieth century science. In 1962, Wilkins, Watson, and Crick received the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.
As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the discovery of the structure
of DNA, the Royal Society of New Zealand, in association with the NZ Portrait
Gallery, commissioned a portrait of Maurice Wilkins (thanks to several contributors
who are listed below) by one of our leading artists, Ms Juliet Kac. It also
commissioned a poem by New Zealand poet Chris Orsman, which was read by Kiwi
author Emily Perkins at the unveiling of the portrait of Maurice Wilkins in
London this past November.
Living in Paradise
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born in the back blocks of the Wairarapa
in 1916, in an isolated community called Pongaroa. His parents were Irish,
his father, Edgar Wilkins, was a doctor with the School Medical Service and
also, interestingly for the times, a vegetarian. Later, many of Edgar’s
findings were used in the treatment of children in industrial, poverty-stricken
areas of Birmingham.
On his mother’s side Wilkins is descended from both Joseph Priestly,
a dabbler in chemistry who invented, among other things, carbonated water;
and George Stephenson, who made the first steam locomotive engine.
The family moved from Pongaroa to Wellington when Wilkins was still a baby,
living at 30 Kelburn Parade. Wilkins has said these years were like "living
in paradise". He believes passionately that he is a New Zealander, saying
his years in Wellington were the happiest of his life.
Wilkins firmly believes the opportunities for exploration and discovery in
New Zealand helped his later development as a scientist: "In the time
of my parents, before World War One, most people who came to New Zealand from
Europe were the more enterprising people; the people who were stronger mentally.
It takes a certain amount of imagination to make a life on the other side of
the world, the same imagination it takes to climb the tallest mountain."
His father Edgar, wanting to further his studies in preventative medicine,
moved the family to Britain when Maurice was six. Maurice was then educated
at Birmingham’s excellent King Edward School and St. John's College,
Cambridge, where he gained a physics degree in 1938.
Student of John Randall
With the start of the Second World War, Wilkins began work for the Ministry
of Home Security and Aircraft production. His research centered on radar development
under John Randall at the University of Birmingham.
John Randall, according to the great scientist and commentator Freeman Dyson,
was more responsible than any other person for the microbiological revolution
that was to come. Prior to this, Dyson has said, Randall had an undistinguished
career as a solid-state physicist. "World War II had started however and
there was a desperate need for microwave transmitters. The English defence
system was based on meter-wave radar, which was completely inadequate - and
everybody knew it. If you wanted effective radar, you needed microwaves. Randall
was asked to invent a good microwave transmitter. It took him just two months.
In November 1939 he invented the cavity magnetron. A thousand times more powerful
than any other microwave transmitter at the time, it absolutely revolutionised
the whole state of the art."
Maurice Wilkins completed his Ph.D in 1940 under Randall at Birmingham, working
on luminescence and the movement of electrons in crystals. The work, which
brought improvements in both the quality and visibility of radar screens, is
still used in radar technology today.
Manhattan Project
Wilkins then became involved in the separation of uranium isotopes for atomic
weapons, working under M.L.E. Oliphant, who had been Rutherford's deputy of
research at Cambridge. Given the nature of Wilkins’ research, it was
only a matter of time before he became involved in the American wartime initiative
exploring nuclear physics, the Manhattan Project.
In 1943 the research group moved from Birmingham to Berkeley, California,
working under Robert Oppenheimer. In 1945, the Manhattan Project's research
led to the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The experience led
Maurice Wilkins to become a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons, an unpopular
stance during the patriotic years following the War. He remains an ardent opponent
of nuclear weapons and is a former president of the British Society for Social
Responsibility in Science. Wilkins asked his portrait painter to feature the
anti-nuclear symbol in the background.
Wilkins said later he didn't have a sense of the catastrophic possibilities
of nuclear weapons during his time at Berkeley. It was a war effort, and their
focus was on gaining the technological upper hand over the Nazis. "Looking
back it was a pretty horrifying situation as the Nazis were winning most facets
of the war."
Yet in hindsight, he says the Nazis lacked the essential brainpower as many
of their top thinkers had left, or had to leave, Germany.
Move to Biophysics
By 1945 John Randall’s magnetron invention, which was said by some to
have won the war, had made him a national hero. He offered Wilkins a post as
a lecturer in physics at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, which was enthusiastically
accepted.
Randall had decided solid-state physics was rather dull, so was instead concentrating
on applying X-ray crystallography to biology. This new biophysics gave Wilkins
a chance to work in an area that was potentially of more benefit to humankind. "I
was a solid-state physicist, my PhD work related to microchips. After the bomb
I wanted to go into another branch of science, one with more positive applications."
In 1946 Randall was installed as a full professor at King’s College
London. Wilkins moved there with the biophysics lab and was appointed to the
newly formed Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit. At first Wilkins
worked on trying to cause genetic mutations in fruit flies using ultrasonic
vibrations. This wasn’t successful, so he switched to developing reflecting
microscopes for ultraviolet spectrographic analysis. This allowed him to study
the DNA content and distribution in cells.
Around this time a method was reported that described how DNA could be extracted
from a gland in a calf so that the long and fragile molecules were not damaged.
Wilkins was given some of this material to study.
The consummate experimentalist, he devised a simple but effective method for
getting better X-ray diffraction patterns from the DNA. The quality depends
on the DNA molecules being aligned parallel to one another. So Wilkins inserted
a small glass rod into a very sticky puddle of the DNA solution, then withdrew
it slowly. By orienting each of the resulting fibres with a small wire frame,
he could photograph the molecules and show the actual shape of DNA.
Picturing the Double Helix
 |
In Stockholm for their Nobel Prizes, December 1962:
Maurice Wilkins, John Steinbeck, John Kendrew, Max Perutz, Francis Crick,
and James D Watson.
|
These well-defined and crystalline X-ray patterns were soon to turn biology
upside down. In 1950 Maurice Wilkins and PhD student Raymond Gosling took improved
images of DNA. These patterns alerted American scientist James Watson, along
with a friend and colleague of Wilkins', Francis Crick, to the possibility
that DNA was helical.
Wilkins felt that he was insufficiently qualified in X-ray diffraction to
progress fast enough, so Randall hired X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin.
Then Crick and Watson, with a 1952 Wilkins/Franklin X-ray diffraction picture
of the DNA molecule, were able to build their correct and detailed model of
the DNA molecule.
On 25 April 1953, after several setbacks culminated in an extraordinary triumph,
three papers were juxtaposed in the science journal Nature detailing the
structure of DNA. The first was by Watson and Crick, the second by Wilkins,
Stokes and Wilson, and the third by Franklin and Gosling.
The implications of the work were just as profound as the creation of the
atomic bomb – but in a much more positive way. The discovery had opened
the doors for science to find out exactly what creates individuals, both physically
and mentally.
Maurice’s life developed rapidly from here. He became deputy director
of the MRC Biophysics Unit, in 1959 was married and became a fellow of the
Royal Society, and in 1960 Wilkins was given the Albert Lasker Award from the
American Public Health Association. In 1962, the trio of Crick, Watson and
Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries.
Teams, Tensions
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| Nobel Prize winners, December 1962
Maurice Wilkins, Max Perutz, Francis Crick, John Steinbeck,
James D Watson, John Kendrew (UPI/Bettman) |
Wilkins became, however, the "third man of DNA", both invisible
and reluctant. He told the New Zealand Listener in 1994 that the main thing
to remember is that "if you have something as explosive in its profound
scientific effects as DNA, it is normal to get some very big tensions building
up between the people involved".
The tensions centered particularly around the relationship between Wilkins
and Rosalind Franklin, the young, gifted chemist who was particularly skilled
with X-ray diffraction. In his 1997 book Crick, Watson and DNA, Paul Strathern
points out that the testy relationship between Wilkins and Franklin was due
to both their temperaments and the social climate of the day: "This was
1950s Britain, very much a stone age where relationships between the sexes
were concerned. Quite simply, Wilkins had no idea how to deal with a woman
in his laboratory. And 'Rosy' Franklin was no ordinary woman. The willful daughter
of a cultured Jewish banking family, she had her own ideas about how things
should be run. Right from the start there was 'chemistry' between the bachelor
Wilkins and the unmarried Franklin. Unfortunately, it was negative chemistry.
And to make matters worse, Franklin arrived under the impression that she was
taking over the X-ray diffraction work on DNA. Wilkins, on the other hand,
thought she was being taken on as his assistant."
History has differing accounts as to the relationship between Wilkins and
Franklin - essentially conflict over the acknowledgement of their roles in
the discoveries. They had different temperaments and certainly argued. In the
Listener story he stated that she might have had problems with the working
environment at King's College: "Everyone was in informal groups, all following
up interesting things. As scientists go she was perfectly normal, but our lab
was very abnormal. It was called 'Randall's Circus' - and it was productive,
but it was not what she was used to."
He has later added: "It was a very odd place for the time. I suppose
the whole place could be seen as very amateurish, but when you're dealing with
brand new science you are an amateur to a certain extent."
"The strange environment did isolate Rosalind Franklin. Much has been
made of her role. There are a couple of new books coming out about her which
should, hopefully, be clearer on what happened. I'm afraid Sayre's book [Rosalind
Franklin & DNA by Anne Sayre] is wildly inaccurate and does make her out
to be something of a martyr."
History can only speculate whether Rosalind Franklin would have been awarded
a Nobel Prize in 1962, especially as the Nobel rules allow a maximum of three
awards for a single discovery. Rosalind Franklin died in 1958 of cancer aged
37, almost certainly due to the effects of the X-rays.
Maurice Wilkins is now 86 years old. He lives in London with his wife Patricia,
in the house he bought with the money from his Nobel Prize. He still does some
teaching at Kings College, where he has been since 1946. At present, he is
completing his autobiography, which is due to be published by Oxford University
Press in April.
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| Maurice Wilkins at the entrance of the new Franklin Wilkins
Bioscience Building at King's College, London, c.1999. Permission Maurice
Wilkins |
A monument marks the place of his birth in remote Wairarapa, and Victoria
University will be unveiling a plaque at the site of his former home in Kelburn,
Wellington, on 10 February. The portrait of Wilkins will hang in the Royal
Society's Science House in Thorndon, Wellington, alongside those of Ernest
Lord Rutherford and Professor Alan MacDiarmid, New Zealand's other Nobel Prize
winners.
Acknowledgements:
Some content and Images
courtesy of the New Zealand Edge Website: www.nzedge.com
The portrait of Maurice Wilkins was made possible by contributions from
- Auckland University of Technology
- Massey University, College of Sciences
- NZ Institute of Chemistry
- NZ Institute of Physics
- NZ Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biosciences
- UNESCO
- Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Science
- Wellington Branch of the Royal Society
