Science and sensibility

New Zealand’s second Nobel laureate has died. Maurice Wilkins has been called the ‘third man of DNA’ and it has been suggested had Rosalyn Franklin survived he wouldn’t have been awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1962. All that aside it is inarguable that Wilkins was responsible for the improvements made to X-ray crystallography that lead to Watson and Cricks renowned insight, the double helix. Although he left New Zealand young he retained a love of the country and said he always identified as a New Zealander. In a television interview given in the early 1990s Wilkins expressed disappointment that he’s achievements weren’t well known in his home country. New Zealand may have been slow to come to the party but in recent years he has become something of a hero, with last year seeing celebrations relating to the 50^th anniversary of the double helix’s discovery and even a poem being produced.

Wilkins also worked in the physics of optics and luminescence and partly as a result of his work on the Manhattan project became a campaigner for nuclear disarmament. He was one of my heroes (I got to feel even more parochial since we both grew up in the Wairarapa) an he will be missed