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
Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was the first article published to describe the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, using X-ray diffraction and the mathematics of a helix transform. It was published by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the scientific journal "Nature" on pages 737–738 of its 171st volume (dated 25 April 1953). This article is often termed a "pearl" of science because it is brief and contains the answer to a fundamental mystery about living organisms. This mystery