born Dec. 15, 1916, Pongaroa, N.Z.
died Oct. 6, 2004, London, Eng.
New Zealand-born British biophysicist.
Educated in Birmingham and Cambridge, he participated in the Manhattan Project , working on the separation of uranium isotopes for use in the atomic bomb. On his return to Britain, he began a series of investigations that led ultimately to his studies of DNA. His X-ray diffraction studies of DNA proved crucial to the determination of DNA's molecular structure by James D. Watson and Francis Crick , for which the three were awarded a 1962 Nobel Prize. He later applied X-ray diffraction techniques to the study of RNA. See also Rosalind Franklin .