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 The controversy arose from Watson and Crick using some of Franklin's unpublished data—without her consent—in their construction of the double helix model of DNA.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
Maurice Wilkins deduced from her X-ray diffraction data. Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA double helical structure in a paper in the journal "Nature" in April 1953. In this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been "stimulated by... the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin. The first Watson-Crick paper appeared in "Nature" on 25 April 1953. The members of the Cambridge and King's College laboratories agreed to report their interlocking work in three papers with continuous pagination in "Nature". Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at