James Watson diffraction data collected by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. The controversy arose from Watson and Crick using some of Franklin's unpublished data—without her consent—in their construction of the double helix model of DNA. Franklin's experimental results provided estimates of the water content of DNA crystals and these results were consistent with the two sugar-phosphate backbones being on the outside of the molecule. Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was a crucial piece of information; before then, Linus Pauling and Watson and Crick had generated erroneous models with the chains inside
History of molecular biology with the work being done on DNA in the early 1950s. In their seminal 1953 paper, Watson and Crick suggested that van der Waals crowding by the 2`OH group of ribose would preclude RNA from adopting a double helical structure identical to the model they proposed - what we now know as B-form DNA. This provoked questions about the three-dimensional structure of RNA: could this molecule form some type of helical structure, and if so, how? As with DNA, early structural work on RNA centered around isolation of native RNA polymers for fiber diffraction analysis. In part because of heterogeneity