Winners of the 1962 Nobel Prizes display their diplomas. Maurice Wilkins is on the far left; Francis Crick is third from the left and James Watson is second from the right. (© Bettmann/CORBIS.)

Watson and Crick are among the most-recognizable names in biology, Wilkins and Franklin perhaps less so, but what happened to these inspirational people after their ideas and dedication made 1953 a watershed year in science?

Francis Harry Compton Crick, the man who, at the age of 30, in his own words “essentially knew nothing”, has continued to address 'big' questions since he and James Watson answered one of the biggest. Collaborations with the 2002 Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner produced ideas on protein synthesis and the genetic code. Crick joined the Salk Institute in California in 1976, and this has remained his affiliation up to the present, where he has focused on the problem of consciousness. Most recently, he has been considering the neural correlates of consciousness: the minimal set of neuronal events that give rise to a specific aspect of a conscious precept.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin, often characterized as the wronged heroine of the double helix story, died 4 years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins received their Nobel Prize in 1962. The Nobel rules preclude posthumous awards, but they also preclude prizes being shared by more than three people, so would she have been honoured even had she been alive? Regardless, Franklin did become something of a feminist icon after Watson was rather dismissive of her in his bestseller of the late 1960s, The Double Helix. Her last working years produced what Watson describes as “very beautiful work” on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus.

James Dewey Watson has retained the high profile that he gained after widespread recognition followed on the heels of the 1953 breakthrough. After brief stints working with Alexander Rich, and Crick again, Watson went on to Harvard where he collaborated with Walter Gilbert. In 1968, he took over as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he revitalized by focusing on tumour biology, eventually becoming its President in 1994. In this role, as well as during a stint at the National Institutes of Health as Associate Director for Human Genome Research and subsequently as Director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, he has remained at the forefront of research and policy making in genetics and molecular biology.

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins has been less publicly prominent than Watson since 1953. In a way this is surprising, given that as well as his work on the structure of DNA he was also involved with the development of the nuclear bomb — an innovation that might even dwarf the profile of the double helix in the public's perception of science in the twentieth century. Wilkins continues to teach and pursue his interest in social responsibility in science, and, at the age of 86, remains an active staff member at King's College, London.