NZ belatedly recognises its DNA pioneer

By BRONWYN SELL in London

The elderly man shuffling through London's King's College, pencil in pocket, is one of New Zealand's unsung heroes - and he's happy for it to stay that way.

Just months before Edmund Hilary conquered Mt Everest, in 1953, Professor Maurice Wilkins was part of a team which discovered DNA.

The comparison, notes New Zealand's High Commissioner to London, Russell Marshall, is poignant. One of the men immediately became a New Zealand icon, the other went quietly back to his laboratory. Not even the Nobel Committee initially recognised the achievement.

It wasn't until 1962 that Professor Wilkins, American geneticist James Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for discovering the building blocks of life.

Professor Wilkins provided the other scientists with crucial information on the structure of DNA. As a biophysicist, he was responsible for the x-ray diffraction which established that DNA was a double helix, and that was the breakthrough.

Again, Professor Wilkins went quietly back to King's, leaving his colleagues to take most of the recognition.

Professor Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958, became known by the few who recognised their achievement as the forgotten scientists.

The scientist is now 85 and looks brittle. He wears a hearing aid and gold-rimmed glasses and walks slowly. And he is finally about to take his rightful place beside Ernest Rutherford and Professor Alan McDiarmid.

To mark next year's 50th anniversary of DNA's discovery, the Royal Society of New Zealand has commissioned a portrait of Professor Wilkins by British-based New Zealand artist Juliet Kac.

The portrait was unveiled in a small ceremony at King's on Tuesday night and will, eventually, hang beside that of Rutherford, in the society's Wellington offices.

New Zealand poet Chris Orsman has written a poem in Professor Wilkins' honour, which was read at the ceremony by London-based New Zealand writer Emily Perkins, and the professor's autobiography will be published next year.

He was also this week presented with drawings by children from his birthplace, the Wairarapa town of Pongaroa, which is about as unknown even in New Zealand as the man himself.

Mr Marshall says the recognition is about redressing our collective failure to acknowledge Professor Wilkins' achievement in reaching the pinnacle of scientific research.

"There's a sense that a couple of people have been forgotten. On the whole, except for rugby, [New Zealanders] are not good at blowing our own trumpet. New Zealand should be proud of Maurice Wilkins for his contribution to the scientific revolution."

Professor Wilkins, renowned by colleagues for his humility, shrugs off the publicity, and dismisses comparisons to the great Rutherford, whose lectures he once attended. "Rutherford was very exceptional, wasn't he?"

"I wouldn't ... " He trails off, and restates simply: "Rutherford was very exceptional.

"Whether or not you get acknowledged is not important. Public attention should go to problems of humanity in general."

Professor Wilkins says he was fortunate to have been born in New Zealand and brought up in a special environment around Wellington, where the family moved when he was a baby.

"I think one of the main things that helped me develop as a scientist was there were all sorts of things to explore there - the Botanical Gardens, the sea and so forth.

The professor says he was a sad 6-year-old when his family left New Zealand for London, and he still identifies himself as a New Zealander.

"My sister and I always look back on New Zealand as the best time of our lives. There was something special back there."

He went on to read natural sciences at St John's College, Cambridge, and got what he describes as a bad degree because he was so preoccupied with the university's anti-war group.

It is strange then that one of his first jobs after university was working on the Manhattan atom bomb project during World War II. He is philosophical about that now and fiercely anti-nuclear. It was a terrible thought that the brilliant physicists in Germany would make it first.

He is proud of New Zealand's nuclear-free stance. In the background of the portrait is a picture containing the symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was his idea to incorporate it.

After the war, he turned to biophysics: "I decided to work on the structure of genes because this was something that was quite fundamental and was not so capable of being misused as the bomb."

Much later, he discovered it wasn't all so simple.

Professor Wilkins' less reticent long-time colleague and fellow scientist, Professor Ray Gosling, who says he was a snotty PhD student in the early 1950s, is optimistic their research will be used for the good of humanity.

The pair worked together in 1950 to take the first images of DNA.

He says Professor Wilkins had a wicked sense of humour, But was shy and, because of that, painstaking in his work. "He made two and two equal seven."

He says it's no surprise it has taken this long for his friend to be recognised. At the time of the discovery, they didn't even know there was an international race on to find it.

"As the years go by, more and more people have recognised what a fundamental discovery it was. "It's only now that we're beginning to see the ramifications. I think the benefits to mankind will be immeasurable."