Sir, – Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004) received a Nobel prize in 1962 with James Watson and Francis Crick for the 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix. Sixty years of the DNA double helix will be celebrated in Dublin when James Watson will unveil a sculpture What is Life by Charles Jencks.
I would like to trace Wilkins’s relatives in Ireland. He was born in New Zealand a few years after his Irish parents, Edgar and Eveline, arrived there. His father, a Trinity medical graduate, came from a well-known academic family; two uncles, his grandfather and two great uncles (one a Hebrew scholar) were also graduates of Trinity. His paternal grandmother’s family was connected with the great Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. His father became headmaster of the High School, and his uncle, the head of Bangor Grammar School. His mother’s father was Richard Whittaker, a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
It would also be of interest to know of relatives of JD Bernal (1901-1971) born in Tipperary, whose work contributed to methods used in the discovery of the double helix. – Yours, etc,
DAVID McCONNELL,
(david.mcconnell@tcd.ie),
Smurfit Institute of Genetics,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.