Maurice Wilkins by James Watson. During the second phase, 1951–52, Wilkins produced clear "B form" "X" shaped images from squid sperm, images he sent to James Watson and Francis Crick, causing Watson to write "Wilkins... has obtained extremely excellent X-ray diffraction photographs" [of DNA]. In 1953 Wilkins' colleague Rosalind Franklin instructed Raymond Gosling to hand over to Wilkins a high quality image of "B" form DNA ("Photo 51"), which she had made in 1952 but had “put it aside” as she was leaving King's College London. Wilkins showed it to Watson. This image, along with the knowledge that Linus Pauling had proposed
Maurice Wilkins deduced from her X-ray diffraction data. Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA double helical structure in a paper in the journal "Nature" in April 1953. In this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been "stimulated by... the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin. The first Watson-Crick paper appeared in "Nature" on 25 April 1953. The members of the Cambridge and King's College laboratories agreed to report their interlocking work in three papers with continuous pagination in "Nature". Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at