Personal Life
Wilkins married an art student, Ruth, when he was at Berkeley. They had a son. He married his second wife Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959. They had four children, Sarah, George, Emily and William.
He published his autobiography, The Third Man of the Double Helix, in 2003.
In the years before WWII, he was an active anti-war activist, and a member of the communist party, until the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Army in September 1939. Formerly classified UK security service papers reveal that, Wilkins came under suspicion of leaking atomic secrets. The files, released in August 2010, indicate surveillance of Wilkins ended by 1953. "After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan," he told Britain's Encounter radio programme in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Maurice Wilkins
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
—Jack Lemmon (b. 1925)