Maurice Wilkins: The Third Man of the Double Helix

Working with Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was a third man, Maurice Wilkins, based at King's College London with co-worker Rosalind Franklin. Franklin died in 1958 and the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Double Helix was awarded to the three men in 1962. As Maurice Wilkins explains here in his autobiography, ' the Franklin/Wilkins story has often been told as an example of the unjustness of male scientists towards their women colleagues, and questions

have been raised over whether credit was distributed fairly when the Nobel Prize was awarded. I have found this situation distressing over the years, and I expect this book is in some ways my attempt to respond to these questions, and to tell my side of that story.'