History of genetics code for specific proteins, leading to the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis. Oswald Avery, Colin Munro MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty showed in 1944 that DNA holds the gene's information. In 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling produced a strikingly clear x-ray diffraction pattern indicating a helical form, and in 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated the molecular structure of DNA. Together, these discoveries established the central dogma of molecular biology, which states that proteins are translated from RNA which is transcribed by DNA. This dogma has since been shown to have exceptions, such as reverse transcription in retroviruses.
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 the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin.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