Herbert Wilson

Professor Herbert Wilson

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Professor Emeritus

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Herbert Wilson is one of the original team who worked on the DNA programme at King's College London fifty years ago. Wilson published his findings in a joint paper with Maurice Wilkins and Alec Stokes in Nature magazine in April 1953 alongside the two other DNA structure papers published by the Franklin and Gosling team, and the Crick and Watson team. Under tenure of a University of Wales Fellowship, Herbert Wilson joined Maurice Wilkins at King's College London in September 1952. The work involved x-ray diffraction studies of DNA, nucleoproteins and cell nuclei. Prior to the double helix model, their studies showed that DNAs from different sources (including biologically active transforming principle) had essentially the same structure, and confirmed that the phosphate groups were on the outside of the molecule. Following the double helix, he participated in the refinement of the DNA structure in Wilkins' group.

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Wilson published his findings in a joint paper with Maurice Wilkins and Alec Stokes in Nature magazine in April 1953 alongside the two other DNA structure papers published by the Franklin and Gosling team, and the Crick and Watson team.

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In 1957 Professor Wilson was appointed Lecturer in Physics at Queen's College, Dundee, University of St Andrews, became a Senior Lecturer in 1964, and then Reader at the University of Dundee in 1973. In 1962 he was Visiting Research Associate at the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, Boston Mass. In 1983 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Stirling (now Emeritus). His research at Dundee and Stirling has involved X-ray crystallographic studies of nucleic acid components and their analogues, and structural studies of flexuous viruses.

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• http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/ppro/dna/scientists.html for the King's College London team of - in alphabetical order - Franklin, Gosling, Randall, Stokes, Wilkins, and Wilson; they may have been 'dysfunctional' but their collective achievement has been somewhat overshadowed by Messrs. Watson & Crick/the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. Time to put King's College London back on the map! There is currently far too much focus on Rosalind Franklin alone.