Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004), New Zealand physicist at work in a laboratory. Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, New Zealand. His father moved the family to Britain when Wilkins was six years old. Wilkins attended St John's College, Cambridge, gaining a degree in Physics in 1938. He obtained a PhD in 1940 and went on to work on a biophysics project at King's College London in 1946. His work involved the X-ray diffraction of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the results of which supported James Watson and Francis Crick's proposal for DNA structure. For this, Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Watson. Photographed in the early 1950s.