In fact, the double-helical structure of DNA was deduced from crystallographic data.
Double-stranded nucleic acids are made up of complementary sequences, in which extensive Watson-Crick base pairing results in the a highly repeated and quite uniform double-helical three-dimensional structure.
Crick and Watson then published their model in Nature on 25 April 1953 in an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with only a footnote acknowledging "having been stimulated by a general knowledge of" Franklin and Wilkin's 'unpublished' contribution.
Final confirmation of the replication mechanism that was implied by the double-helical structure followed in 1958 through the Meselson-Stahl experiment.
Some scientists, including Dr. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double-helical structure of DNA, have suggested that life had too little time to originate on the primitive earth, given only a "prebiotic soup" of simple chemicals.
It was a glimpse of the crisscross pattern that broke the mental ice jam for James Watson, allowing him and Francis Crick to guess the double-helical structure.
What Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick discovered was DNA's twisted shape and its double-helical structure.
James Watson (born 1928) is an American biologist and chemist, the codiscoverer of the double-helical structure of DNA, awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Mitochondrial DNA has the same double-helical structure as chromosomal DNA.
For example, the double-helical structure of DNA was deduced from an X-ray diffraction pattern that had been generated by a fibrous sample.