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 The controversy arose from Watson and Crick using some of Franklin's unpublished data—without her consent—in their construction of the double helix model of DNA.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
Molecular models of DNA 1953. That same year, Maurice F. Wilkins, A. Stokes and H.R. Wilson, reported the first X-ray patterns of "in vivo" B-DNA in partially oriented salmon sperm heads. The development of the first correct double helix molecular model of DNA by Crick and Watson may not have been possible without the biochemical evidence for the nucleotide base-pairing ([A---T]; [C---G]), or Chargaff's rules. Although such initial studies of DNA structures with the help of molecular models were essentially static, their consequences for explaining the "in vivo" functions of DNA were significant in the areas of protein biosynthesis and the quasi-universality of the