Scientific method done by the person who made the prediction, and the characterization is based on experiments done by someone else. Published results of experiments can also serve as a hypothesis predicting their own reproducibility. After considerable fruitless experimentation, being discouraged by their superior from continuing, and numerous false starts, Watson and Crick were able to infer the essential structure of DNA by concrete modeling of the physical shapes of the nucleotides which comprise it. They were guided by the bond lengths which had been deduced by Linus Pauling and by Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images. .."DNA Example" Science is a social
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