Herbert Wilson

Herbert Rees Wilson FRSE (20 March 1929 – 22 May 2008) was a physicist, who was one of the team who worked on the structure of DNA at King's College London, under the direction of Sir John Randall.

He entered Bangor University, where he gained a first class honours degree in physics in 1949 and a PhD in 1952 under the supervision of professor Edwin Owen.

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.

The 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was subsequently jointly awarded to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins.

In his autobiography The Third Man of The Double Helix, Maurice Wilkins does not specifically credit Stokes, Wilson and several other co-authors of his papers in Nature.