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
Non-helical models of DNA structure image with Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alexander Stokes, and Herbert Wilson, as well as base-pairing chemical and biochemical information by Erwin Chargaff. Wilkins and colleagues also reported on X-ray patterns of the state of "in vivo" B-DNA in partially oriented salmon sperm heads. Crick, Wilkins, and Watson each received one-third of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to this discovery. Franklin, whose breakthrough X-ray diffraction data was used to formulate the DNA structure, died in 1958, and thus was ineligible to be nominated for a Nobel Prize. In 1963, John Cairns published autoradiographs of the