Nirenberg and Leder experiment acid. Oswald Avery discovered that the substance responsible for producing inheritable change in the disease-causing bacteria was neither a protein nor a lipid, rather deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). He and his colleagues Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty suggested that DNA was responsible for transferring genetic information. Later, Erwin Chargaff discovered that the makeup of DNA differs from one species to another. These experiments helped pave the way for the discovery of the structure of DNA. In 1953, with the help of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed DNA is structured as a double helix.
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