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Who among the following shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 along with Francis Crick and James Watson for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids ?
Explanation
The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Francis Harry Compton Crick, James Dewey Watson, and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins. The award recognized their groundbreaking discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material [1]. While Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction images were crucial to the discovery of the DNA double helix, she passed away in 1958 and the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously. Maurice Wilkins, who worked at King's College London, provided the experimental evidence through X-ray crystallography that supported the double-helix model proposed by Watson and Crick. Other scientists like Erwin Chargaff and Phoebus Levene made significant contributions to DNA chemistry but were not recipients of the 1962 prize.
Sources
- [1] https://www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/achievements/lmb-nobel-prizes/1962-francis-crick-james-watson/