Watson and Crick. Caricature of the molecular biologists and discoverers of the structure of DNA James Watson (born 1928, left) and Francis Crick (1916-2004), with their model of a DNA molecule. Watson, an American, and Crick, British, met at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, in 1951. Their work on DNA was performed with a knowledge of Chargaff's ratios of the bases in DNA and access to the X-ray crystallography of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College London. Combining this knowledge led to the deduction that DNA exists as a double helix. Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Franklin having died in 1958.