Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA structure in the journal Nature. Their landmark paper, titled “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” appeared on 25 April 1953.
The paper was remarkably brief, occupying only two pages, but it proposed a model with two complementary strands coiled into a double helix. The arrangement of the bases suggested how genetic information could be copied: adenine pairs with thymine, while guanine pairs with cytosine.
The model was built from several lines of evidence, including X-ray diffraction work associated with Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling, and Maurice Wilkins. Nature published three connected papers in the same issue, allowing the Cambridge and King’s College teams to present related findings together.
The journal title is sometimes confused with Science because both are major scientific publications. PNAS and Cell are also influential journals, but neither published the original Watson-and-Crick DNA structure paper.