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 The controversy arose from Watson and Crick using some of Franklin's unpublished data—without her consent—in their construction of the double helix model of DNA.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
Non-helical models of DNA structure Non-helical models of DNA structure In the history of molecular biology, non-helical or "side-by-side" models of DNA were proposed in the 1970s as a challenge to the standard double-helical model. The non-helical models attempted to solve problems relating to the topology of circular DNA chromosomes during replication. These theories were briefly considered seriously as a minority viewpoint, but they were later largely rejected due to X-ray crystallography of DNA duplexes and later the nucleosome core particle, as well as the discovery of topoisomerases, and these non-double-helical models are not currently accepted by the mainstream scientific community. The strands of a