English physicist who worked on radar and magnetic mine development during World War II. After the war, with James Watson he pondered Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction data and tried to construct a physical model of DNA. Watson and Crick believed the model had to be helical based on X-ray diffraction data, and were afraid they were about to be scooped by Pauling who was hard at work on his alpha helix model. James Watson and Crick got a much needed clue upon reading Chargaff's paper on one-to-one adenine to thymine and cytosine to guanine rations. In 1953, after a brainstorm by James Watson, in which he realized that the shape of the base pairs meant they could only be arranging in a certain way, they published a paper proposing at the DNA molecule had double helical structure. Crick, James Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for this discovery, which was subsequently verified experimentally.

Avery, Chargaff, Franklin (Rosalind), Kornberg, Pauling, Watson (James), Wilkins