Maurice Wilkins, the biophysicist who died on October 5, 2004, at age 87, was the most reticent and least-known of the three researchers awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for the discovery of the double helix, the structural basis of DNA. Wilkins operated in the long shadows of James Watson and Francis Crick, the duo most associated with a discovery that many rank as the most significant, in any field of research, of the 20th century.

If Watson and Crick were the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of molecular biology, Maurice Wilkins was the field's Charlie Watts, an understated and self-effacing scientist who provided the crucial underpinnings for modern DNA research. Without the early work of Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin at King's College, London, in the field of x-ray diffraction -- an imaging technique that reveals the molecular structure of materials -- it is unlikely that Watson and Crick could have made their discoveries. And even after the double helix was revealed in 1953, Wilkins spent the better part of the next decade confirming the finding.