20th century in science biologically relevant molecules, they were, till the end of the 20th century, more a collection of rules, observations, and recipes than rigorous ab initio quantitative methods. This heuristic approach triumphed in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick deduced the double helical structure of DNA by constructing models constrained by and informed by the knowledge of the chemistry of the constituent parts and the X-ray diffraction patterns obtained by Rosalind Franklin. This discovery lead to an explosion of research into the biochemistry of life. In the same year, the Miller–Urey experiment demonstrated that basic constituents of protein, simple amino acids,
Z-DNA one another in a left-handed fashion. The relationship between Z-DNA and the more familiar B-DNA was indicated by the work of Pohl and Jovin, who showed that the ultraviolet circular dichroism of poly(dG-dC) was nearly inverted in 4 M sodium chloride solution. The suspicion that this was the result of a conversion from B-DNA to Z-DNA was confirmed by examining the Raman spectra of these solutions and the Z-DNA crystals. Subsequently, a crystal structure of "Z-DNA" was published which turned out to be the first single-crystal X-ray structure of a DNA fragment (a self-complementary DNA hexamer d(CG)). It was resolved