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James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick

About James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick

James D. Watson, an American biologist born in Chicago in 1928, and Francis Crick (1916–2004), an English physicist turned biologist, met at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1951. Their 1953 model of DNA earned them, with Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Their work depended on X-ray data from King's College London, especially that of Rosalind Franklin.

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Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

1953 · Postwar Contemporary · Essays

'Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' is a one-page letter by James Watson and Francis Crick published in the journal Nature on 25 April 1953. In about nine hundred words and one simple diagram it proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information in living things.