The biophysicist Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Francis Crick and Jim Watson, nine years after their discovery of the structure of DNA. But while Crick and Watson enjoyed the limelight, Wilkins did not. A diffident and private man, he preferred to stay in the shadows, and his contribution to the remarkable discovery of the double-helix DNA structure - the molecule that genes are made of - is relatively little known. Few colleagues ever got to know him well.

In 1953 Wilkins was working at King's College, London, where he and his group used X-ray diffraction methods to measure the angles, bonds and orientations of the DNA molecule. At the same time, their friendly rivals, Crick and Watson, were pursuing their DNA research at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.

Crick and Watson were familiar with the X-ray work at King's, and it was from this data that they, with remarkable biochemical and biological insight, derived the double-helix model and saw its biological significance. Papers describing the results of the two groups appeared side by side in the science magazine Nature in April 1953. Wilkins's group then spent eight years demonstrating that the model was right.

The award of the Nobel Prize to Crick, Watson and Wilkins followed in 1962, but was not an unblemished triumph. Controversy soon arose, mainly about the role in the discovery of the structure of DNA of one of Wilkins's colleagues at King's, Rosalind Franklin. Using X-ray techniques, in which she was particularly gifted, Franklin had taken what was then the clearest X-ray diffraction photograph of the structure (the famous Photograph 51), clearly showing that it was a helix.

It was with the aid of this and of Franklin's unpublished data that Crick and Watson were able to work out the structure of DNA. Franklin did not know to what extent they used her data, and was probably not even aware that Watson had seen the photograph. But Franklin herself was the first to realise that there are two forms of DNA.

In March 1953, however, she left Wilkins's team and went to work with John Desmond Bernal at Birkbeck College, London. Like Franklin and Wilkins, Bernal was an X-ray crystallographer. In 1958, after five years of research with Bernal, Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37, four years before the Nobel was awarded.

Wilkins, Crick and Watson were later accused of exploiting Franklin's work, and the story is often told as an example of the unfair treatment of female colleagues by male scientists. Undoubtedly the three should have clearly acknowledged that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without Franklin's data, and although much scientific work is collaborative, they were aware that a Nobel Prize was in the offing.

Wilkins himself commented: "Undoubtedly Rosalind's contribution to the DNA structure was considerable, but not necessarily in a different category from those of other workers in our lab." Others believe that this understates Franklin's contribution.

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was born at Pongaroa, New Zealand, in 1916, the only son of Edgar Henry and Eveline Wilkins of Dublin. His father was a medical doctor who had gone to New Zealand in 1913, but in 1923 he obtained a job as a school doctor in Birmingham and the family returned to England.

Wilkins went to Wylde Greene College and then to King Edward's High School in Birmingham. While at school he was a keen astronomer, using telescopes, including one using a 9.25in (234.95mm) concave mirror that he had made in his own workshop. His interest in optics continued long into his professional life.

He won a number of scholarships that covered most of his university expenses, allowing him to study physics at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1936. He chose St John's because its staff included especially eminent physicists such as Mark Oliphant. Surprisingly, he achieved only a lower second in Part II of the Natural Science Tripos. Perhaps he spent too much time at the University Socialist Society and on other non-academic activities.

He was, for example, active in the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group. Because of the threat of war with Germany, the Government issued gas masks to every British citizen. The Anti-War Group studied the masks and helped to have them improved. Meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism persuaded Wilkins to join the Communist Party, which was then much in vogue in Cambridge.

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