Wilkins, Crick, and Watson: Nobel Prize for Work on the Structure of DNA

Abstract

Maurice H. F. Wilkins, Francis H. C. Crick, and James D. Watson were recipients of the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Watson, who was profiled in a vignette published in the July 1996 issue of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings (page 658), was born in Chicago, Illinois, on Apr. 6,1928. He met Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University (England) in 1951, where they collaborated on the Nobel Prizewinning work. Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, North Island, New Zealand, on Dec. 15, 1916. In 1938, he received a B.A. degree in physics from St. John's College in Cambridge and joined the Ministry of Home Security and Aircraft Production. He conducted graduate research in radar at the University of Birmingham and received a Ph.D. degree in 1940. His dissertation on luminescence and the movement of electrons in crystals contributed to improvements in radar screens. Subsequently, he worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for atomic weapons and was assigned to the University of California at Berkeley as a member of the Manhattan Project. In 1945, Wilkins became a lecturer in physics at St. Andrew's University in Scotland. The next year, he joined the staff of King's College at the University of London, where he studied the complex structure of the DNA molecule with ultrasonography and then with ultraviolet microscopy. He discovered a thin fiber of DNA, and with Rosalind E. Franklin (1920-1958), a colleague at King's College, he determined that the DNA molecule was shaped like a double helix, resembling a ladder twisted into a spiral. These findings were shared with Crick and Watson, who proposed the three-dimensional structure of the DNA molecule—a double helix consisting of two strands of sugar and phosphate joined by pairs of nitrogen bases within the helix. The helix bases are attached by hydrogen bonds, and when separated, a new molecule is synthesized by the opposite portion of each half of the original molecule. Wilkins was deputy director of the Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit at King's College from 1955 to 1970 and served as its director from 1970 to 1972. Subsequently, he became director of the Neurobiology Unit and headed the Cell Biophysics Unit from 1974 to 1980. He became professor emeritus in 1981. Crick was born in Northampton (northwest of London in central England) on Jun. 8,1916. In 1937, he received a B.S. degree in physics from University College in London. During World War II (1939-1945), he joined the British Admiralty Research Laboratory and participated in the development of mines. Influenced by What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell, a book written by Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), Crick became interested in biology, and in 1947, he began working at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge. Subsequently, he worked on investigations into the molecular structure of proteins with Max F. Perutz (1914) at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, where he met Watson in 1951. In 1953, Crickreceived his Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University for his work on the x-ray diffraction analysis of protein structure. He became director of the Molecular Biology Laboratory at Cambridge in 1962. In 1977, he joined the staff of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, where he conducted research on the mechanism of vision and the function of dreams. He also postulated that life on earth may have originated from microorganisms that were disseminated through space from another planet—the so-called panspermia hypothesis. Wilkins, Crick, and Watson were honored on a stamp issued by Sweden in 1989.