Maurice Wilkins died on October 6, 2004 at the age of 87. Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's structure with James Watson and Frances Crick. Although Crick and Watson received more attention over the years for this discovery, Wilkins pioneered the means by which the discovery could be made, a technique called X-ray fibre diffraction. He also worked to verify the findings. Another member of the team was Rosalind Franklin. She took the X-ray photographs from which Crick and Watson derived their conclusions about DNA's structure.

You might find it interesting to read the actual published paper by Watson and Crick in which their discovery was publicly reported: A Structure for DNA from Nature, 1953. It's a surprisingly short paper for such a landmark discovery.