Maurice Wilkins is dead

The quiet, unassuming ‘third man’ in the Double Helix story has died at the age of 87. The X-ray diffraction images provided by his unit in King’s College, London (many of them done by Rosie Franklin) gave Francis Crick and James Watson the clues they needed to deduce the helical structure of DNA. The Guardian ran a lovely obituary of Wilkins written by the late Anthony Tucker which quotes the beautiful description of his work he gave in his Nobel dissertation. “Determining the three-dimensional structure of a molecule by means of x-ray diffraction”, he said, “is rather like trying to understand the workings of a folding chair by looking only at its shadow.”