Alec Stokes

Alec Stokes (Alexander Rawson Stokes, June 27 1919–February 5 2003) was one of the key contributors in the original DNAa research team at King's College London. Stokes worked alongside Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, and Herbert Wilson, to determine the structure of DNA in the 1950s, under the direction of Sir John Randall.

In 1993, on the 40th anniversary of the discovery of DNA, King's College London erected a special plaque in the Quad at the Strand campus to mark the College's contribution to the discovery.

Stokes was born in Macclesfield, England. Stokes received a first-class natural science tripos in 1940 at Trinity College, Cambridge and researched X-ray crystallography at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He also lectured in physics at the Royal Holloway College, London before joining John Randall's team at King's College London in 1947. His considerable understanding of x-ray diffraction processes led to his realisation of the helical structure of DNA. In fact, Maurice Wilkins had set him the task of working out what a helical structure would look like as an x-ray diffraction photograph and his brilliant mind was able to work this out through mathematical calculations in only a few hours during a train journey! Whilst Crick and Watson were describing the three-dimensional model they had built, Wilkins, Stokes and Wilson were publishing an article describing the experimental evidence for this structure; all three papers (including one by Franklin and Gosling) were published in Nature during April 1953.

Unfortunately in his autobiography The Third Man of The Double Helix, Maurice Wilkins does not specifically credit Stokes and Wilson as co-authors of their paper in Nature; whether this was deliberate on his part or just down to rather poor sub-editing by OUP is not known.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Stokes continued to work on large biological molecules, proving his exceptional mathematical skill. He retired from King's in 1982 and continued to work on publications, including the books 'The Theory of the Optical Properties of Inhomogeneous Materials' (1963) and 'The Principles of Atomic and Nuclear Physics' (1972).