The discovery of the DNA double helix is credit widely to James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick in 1953, based on critical evidence including X-ray diffraction data produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Watson and Crick published their model of a right-handed double helix with complementary base pairs, which established the structural basis for how genetic information is stored and replicated.
Key nuances:
- Watson and Crick are generally named as the principal discoverers of the double-helix structure, and they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Maurice Wilkins for that work.
- Rosalind Franklin’s contributions, particularly her high-quality X-ray diffraction images (notably Photograph 51) and her careful interpretation of DNA fiber data, were pivotal to the development of the correct model, though she did not share the Nobel Prize and her role has been the subject of much historical discussion.
- The broader historical context includes prior foundational work identifying DNA as the genetic material (e.g., Avery–MacLeod–McCarty transformation experiments) and subsequent appreciation of Franklin’s and Wilkins’s data by Crick and Watson in constructing the correct model.
If you’d like, I can summarize the key experiments and figures involved, or provide a timeline of the discoveries leading up to the 1953 model.
