The landmark ideas of Watson and Crick relied heavily on the work of other scientists. What did the duo actually discover? Many people believe that American biologist James Watson and English ...

In the late nineteenth century, a German biochemist found the nucleic acids, long-chain polymers of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and several nitrogen-containing bases.

Researchers were investigating the wound-healing properties of deoxyribose, a sugar critical in the structure of DNA.