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 The controversy arose from Watson and Crick using some of Franklin's unpublished data—without her consent—in their construction of the double helix model of DNA.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 the sharpest pictures of both through X-ray diffraction technique. The first calculations of the Fourier transform of an atomic helix were reported one year earlier by Cochran, Crick and Vand, and were followed in 1953 by the computation of the Fourier transform of a coiled-coil by Crick. Structural information is generated from X-ray diffraction studies of oriented DNA fibers with the help of molecular models of DNA that are combined with crystallographic and mathematical analysis of the X-ray patterns. The first reports of a double helix molecular model of B-DNA structure were made by James Watson and Francis Crick in