NZ scientist Russian spy suspect

Professor Maurice Wilkins. Photo / Supplied

One of New Zealand's greatest scientists, Maurice Wilkins, was investigated by Britain's MI5 intelligence agency, as a suspect in passing information to Russia on the first atomic bombs.

Intelligence agencies eventually caught up with the real spies, who included British scientist Klaus Fuchs, arrested in 1950 and convicted of supplying British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR.

Unaware that he had ever been under investigation, Professor Wilkins went on to share with James Watson and Francis Crick the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the "double helix" structure of DNA.

The MI5 investigation, detailed in newly released files at Britain's National Archives, began in April 1951 when the FBI reported that an atomic scientist who worked on an atomic energy project had been in close touch with communist party members in Brooklyn, New York in 1945, the Daily Telegraph reported in London.

The scientist was said to have passed on everything he knew about the atomic energy programme, known as the Manhattan Project, including "the set-up in New Mexico," the report said, referring to weapons research at Los Alamos.

The FBI named nine possible suspects, including Prof Wilkins.

MI5 investigated Prof Wilkins and reported that he was a "caricature of a scientist in that he seems to be both incapable of dealing with ordinary human situations and apparently uninterested in them".

"At the same time he realises his own failings and tries to get over the difficulty by consultations with psychoanalysis," MI5 said

Another letter to MI5 in August 1953 described Prof Wilkins as "certainly a very queer fish" but said his associates were left-wing socialists rather than communists.

In June 1953 MI5 reported they had "nothing concrete against Prof Wilkins" and that telephone and mail intercepts were "so far not producing much of interest or value" and the case was dropped.

Ironically, the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions led the private, self-effacing man - born in 1916 in Pongaroa, in northern Wairarapa - to become a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons.

"After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan," he told Britain's Encounter radio programme in 1999.

He began putting his expertise towards using x-rays to produce photographs of DNA molecules - effectively pioneering the new scientific field biophysics.

In 1950, he produced the world's first pictures of DNA which led to the discovery by American geneticist James Watson and English biophysicist Francis Crick of the "double helix" structure of DNA and confirmation that DNA carried life's hereditary information.

Prof Wilkins died in London in 2004.

- NZPA