The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins (Popular Science)
(Quick, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the double...)
Quick, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the double helical structure of DNA? Most people would say Watson and Crick. But most people would make Maurice Wilkins very upset. The Rodney Dangerfield of biology, Wilkins shared the prize with Watson and Crick but missed out on the limelight, due largely to Watson's hit book, The Double Helix. Wilkins thought the book was so misleading he asked Harvard University Press not to publish it. Things have quieted down a bit now, and Wilkins is now telling the story his way. This book tells how he showed his colleagues the x-ray picture that gave them their crucial insight, and about his interactions with Rosalind Franklin, the researcher who actually created the picture, and who also received very little credit for her role in the discovery. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the DNA discovery. Finally Wilkins gets to have his say.
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was a New Zealand-born British physicist and molecular biologist, and Nobel laureate whose research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar.
Background
Wilkins was born on 15 December 1916 in Pongaroa, north Wairarapa, New Zealand where his father, Edgar Henry Wilkins was a medical doctor. His family had come from Dublin, where his paternal and maternal grandfathers were from.
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born in New Zealand to Irish parents.
Education
Working at King’s College, London, he used x-ray diffraction of the DNA molecule in order to discern its structure.
His father Edgar was a physician who had a strong interest in public health and the family moved to London in 1922 so that he could pursue a diploma of public health.
He became active in several student organizations, including the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group and the Natural Sciences Club.
Wilkins completed the requirements for his PhD in 1940, and soon joined Oliphant’s atomic bomb research team and investigated how to evaporate uranium metal.
In 1944, the Birmingham Bomb Lab relocated to Berkeley, California, to join forces with the Manhattan Project.
Wilkins began to collect specimens of nucleic acids, proteins, and viruses to x-ray and examine using ultraviolet microscopes, and soon narrowed his focus to DNA. In a stroke of luck, he attended a seminar on 12 May 1950 by the Austrian researcher Rudolf Signer, who distributed samples of his high-quality calf thymus DNA.
Career
Wilkins thrived intellectually and socially at Cambridge.
His talk for the club was a presentation on J. D. Bernal’s work on x-ray crystallography.
Luminescence allowed Wilkins to combine his interests in crystalline structure and x-ray diffraction.
After reading Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, he was inspired to join Randall and investigate Schrödinger’s proposal that the gene was an aperiodic crystal.
After spending a year at St Andrews in Scotland, Randall’s biophysics group moved to King’s College, London, with funding from the Medical Research Council early in 1947.
Wilkins cast about for an appropriate research subject within the complex structure of the cell.
In 1944, Oswald Avery had shown that genes were made of DNA, and his work was slowly disseminated through the genetics community.
While preparing the samples for x-raying, Wilkins noticed that when he touched a glass rod to the moist DNA gel, he was able to draw out a thin filament of the molecule.
As he recalled in his Nobel lecture, “the perfection and uniformity of the fibres suggested that the molecules in them were regularly arranged” and would be “excellent objects to study by X-ray diffraction analysis” (p. 756).
Wilkins applied this technique to extracted DNA as well as to DNA in cells, but the Signer DNA gave the clearest pictures.
If DNA were a crystal, then it would be possible to analyze the x-ray images and draw conclusions about its structure.
The correct model would have to account for the biochemical, genetic, and physical data on DNA, but the images could provide a direct method for determining its molecular structure.
Earlier that spring, Randall had endorsed the application of a talented x-ray crystallographer named Rosalind Franklin for a fellowship to join the biophysics unit at King's.
Franklin was scheduled to begin her fellowship in January 1951, and in November 1950, Randall sent her a letter describing her future research project on “certain biological fibres in which we are interested. ”
It was a small group, Randall noted, and so “as far as the experimental X-ray effort is concerned there will be at the moment only yourself and Gosling” (cited in Maddox, 2002, p. 114, and Olby, 1994, p. 346).
Apparently, he intended for Franklin and Gosling to study extracted DNA while Wilkins focused on cellular samples.
When Franklin first arrived at King's, she and Wilkins had cordial interactions, and even had meals together at the laboratory.
Franklin was committed to a fine analysis of the x-ray diffraction patterns and was not interested in Wilkins’s more free-flowing approach.
They rarely shared data, and Wilkins often disparaged her to Crick and Watson.
To the chagrin of many who knew her, James Watson used the same disrespectful nickname in The Double Helix (1980).
In May 1951, Wilkins traveled to Naples, Italy, to report on his research to a meeting on “Submicroscopical Structure of Protoplasm. ”
His images of a crystalline DNA pattern caught the attention of James Watson, who was in his first year of his European postdoctoral research.
Wilkins’s presentation was part of the reason Watson decided to move to Cambridge to study the structure of nucleic acids under Lawrence Bragg.
She had recently noticed that DNA actually formed two patterns, labeled A and B, depending on how wet the samples were.
The B, or “wet, ” form yielded a clear crystalline pattern, but Franklin was focusing on doing a Patterson analysis of the more complicated A form.
He spent the rest of that year taking more x-ray photographs of different living samples of DNA, and trying to reconcile the diffraction and biochemical data.
When Bragg and Randall heard about the incorrect model, they agreed that Watson and Crick should leave the DNA problem to the team at King's.
However, Wilkins and Franklin made little noticeable progress on DNA in 1952.
Wilkins saw Franklin’s clear Photograph 51 from May 1952, and understood that it showed a helical structure.
He also began thinking seriously about the implications of Chargaff’s base-pair ratios.
Franklin had decided to leave King’s and DNA research in favor of virus research at Birkbeck College, but as she was finishing up her research, she began to consider the possibility that the B form was evidence of a two-chain helix.
However, because the relationship between them was so hostile, they did not consult each other on how to combine these ideas with the experimental evidence. The King’s College researchers were unaware that Watson and Crick had once again begun working on DNA after hearing that Pauling was interested in its structure.
When Wilkins showed Watson a copy of Photograph 51 in early February 1953, he had no idea that it would be the catalyst for Watson’s building of a correct model.
Soon thereafter, Watson and Crick invited Wilkins to Cambridge to show him Pauling’s incorrect structure and to ask if they could once again tackle the DNA problem.
He agreed, not knowing how close they were to a complete model.
When they finished it in early March, Wilkins was the first person outside of Cambridge to see the double helix.
After an afternoon of difficult conversation about how much the King’s work had helped Watson and Crick, he agreed that Wilkins and his colleagues would publish their data jointly with Watson and Crick’s announcement in Nature.
Gosling and Franklin added a short note describing the helical evidence in the B photographs, and the three papers appeared on 25 April 1953.
Life after the Double Helix.
The validity and importance of the double helix was quickly accepted by the scientific community, and its discoverers were given numerous awards.
Wilkins was elected to the Royal Society in 1959, and he shared the 1960 Albert Lasker Award with Watson and Crick.
(Nobel citation).
In 1962, Wilkins was also honored as a Companion of the British Empire.
Wilkins spent many years using x-ray techniques to confirm and expand the double helix model of DNA and RNA, and officially stopped his DNA research in 1967.
He was outraged by the manuscript of Watson’s The Double Helix in part because of the portrayal of his relationship with Franklin.
Wilkins was cast as a villain in Anne Sayre’s 1975 biography of Franklin, intended to be a balance to the story told in The Double Helix.
He deeply resented Judson’s implication that he deliberately took Photograph 51 out of Franklin’s drawer to show Watson and defended himself on several occasions.
Maddox’s 2002 biography of Franklin places part of the blame for her unhappiness at King’s on Randall, but provides evidence from Franklin’s letters that Wilkins’s behavior was a large factor in her decision to move to Birkbeck.
In 2003, Wilkins published The Third Man of the Double Helix as an attempt to clarify his interactions with Franklin.
In his account, he and Franklin both behaved in ways that prevented them from collaborating on DNA, and he regretted that their personal clash had a role in their losing the race to the double helix. Science and Society.
Since his student days at Cambridge, Wilkins was interested in the social implications of science and technology.
Wilkins served as the chair of the discussions, and offered introductory and closing remarks to the eight hundred attendees.
Science and technology had done harm to the world in the twentieth century, but with a moral approach, scientists could simultaneously “save the world from war and restore dignity and nobility to science” (1985, p. 90).
In the years before World War II, he was an active anti-war activist, joining the Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group. He joined the Communist Party, until the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Army in September 1939.
Views
Starting in the 1966, he was involved with various antinuclear groups, including Pugwash, Food and Disarmament International, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
In an atmosphere of intense antiscience sentiment, Wilkins argued for the value of scientific research to modern society and noted that scientists had an obligation to ensure that the public had a thorough understanding of the content and applications of their work.
Quotations:
"After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan, " he told Britain's Encounter radio program in 1999.
Membership
Wilkins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1959[2] and an EMBO Member in 1964.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Horace Freeland Judson describes Wilkins as “one who came early to X-ray studies of DNA and stayed late” (1979, p. 25).
Connections
Wilkins was married twice. His first wife, Ruth, was an art student whom he met whilst he was at Berkeley. Their marriage ended in divorce, and Ruth bore her son by Wilkins after their divorce.
Wilkins married Patricia Chidgey in 1958. They had four children, Sarah, George, Emily and William. His widow Patricia and the children from their marriage survive him.
In 1960 he was presented with the American Public Health Association's Albert Lasker Award
and in 1962 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Also in 1962 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the structure of DNA.