Maurice Wilkins, the British biophysicist who contributed to determining the structure of the nucleic acid DNA, was born at Pongaroa, New Zealand on December 15, 1916. At age six, he went to England to attend school at King Edward's School, Birmingham. Wilkins studied physics at St. John's College, Cambridge and received his degree in 1938. He then went to Birmingham University where he was accepted as a research assistant. In 1940 Wilkins obtained his Ph. D. from the same university. His thesis was on the study of thermal stability of trapped electrons in phosphors. He worked to improve cathode-ray tube screens for radar during the war and under Professor M. L. E. Oliphant studied the separation of uranium isotopes in bombs. Wilkins moved with the rest of the research group from Birmingham to the official site of the Manhattan Project in Berkeley, California.

In 1945 Wilkins lectured on physics at St. Andrew's University, Scotland. He already had seven years of physics research behind him and he set out to began work on biophysics. His research moved to King's College, London in 1946 and the same year became a member of the Medical Research Council of Biophysics Research Unit. His work led him to the development of reflecting microscopes for ultraviolet microspectrophotometric study of nucleic acids. In 1950 he was promoted to Assistant Director of the Medical Research Council Unit, and to Deputy Director in 1955. Wilkins also studied the position and groupings of pyrimidines and purines in nucleic acids and the tobacco mosaic virus. He was able to see the position of virus particles in crystallized TMV with the use of the visible-light polarizing microscope. He started x-ray diffraction studies of DNA and sperm heads and discovered the DNA molecule seemed to have a defined double spiral structure. Wilkins shared his work with American biochemist James Dewey Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick. Watson and Crick were able to work out the molecular structure of DNA to be a double helix. More x-ray studies proved them to be correct. He married Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959 and has a daughter, Sarah and son, George. Wilkins was awarded the Albert Lasker Award jointly with Watson and Crick in 1960. In 1961 he was made Honorary Lecturer of Department of Biophysics. The following year he was elected Companion of the British Empire. Wilkins, Crick and Watson together shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 in physiology or medicine.