Exposing DNA

When the King of Sweden presented his Nobel Prize for Medicine he didn’t just give it to those limelight-hogging scientists J D Watson and Francis Crick. There was third recipient who seems to often be forgotten – New Zealander Maurice Wilkins, a Wairarapa man who was born at Pongaroa.
While Watson and Crick’s contribution is well heralded and most people recognise them as being the discoverers of DNA and indeed they were the first to announce their theory of the conjecture.

However it wasn’t until Maurice Wilkins had done a huge lot of work on the proposal that it was accepted as a fact. In short Maurice ‘proved’ the conjecture.
Also greatly short changed was the scientist Rosalind Franklin who had done the initial work on the subject with Watson and Crick using her work as a basis for their own, a fact they never acknowledged. Indeed there is written opinion that they actually stole her material.