LONDON - Maurice Wilkins, a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of DNA research, has died. He was 88.

Wilkins was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962 along with the two scientists credited for describing the structure of DNA, Francis Crick and James Watson.

He died in a London hospital late Tuesday.

Announcing his death, principals at King's College in London, where Wilkins produced his groundbreaking X-ray work that led to Watson and Crick's discovery, described the professor as "a towering figure, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century and a man of immense humanity."

Watson, the only scientist involved in the DNA project who is still living, said Wednesday that Wilkins was "a very intelligent scientist with a very deep personal concern that science be used to benefit society."

"This started in his early days, when he witnessed the atrocities of war, and continued through his life. He will be sorely missed," Watson said in a statement.

Colleagues said Wilkins, who also worked on the American atomic bomb program known as the Manhattan Project, was proud of his membership in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Wilkins and his colleagues spent seven years proving that the hypothetical DNA model that Watson and Crick constructed was correct.

But it was his initial work on X-ray crystallography that was so critical to the discovery. The technique uses scattered X-rays to produce images of the structure of molecules. Wilkins, together with Rosalind Franklin, whom he recruited, found that the long chains of DNA were arranged in the form of a double helix.