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
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