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 life, personal and/or life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“Love’s boat has been shattered against the life of everyday. You and I are quits, and it’s useless to draw up a list of mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains.”
—Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)