In the early 1950s, the precise physical structure of DNA, the molecule responsible for carrying hereditary genetic information within living organisms, remained one of the most actively pursued open questions in biology, with several competing research teams racing toward what many suspected would be an enormously significant scientific discovery. Two researchers at a British university are most commonly credited with solving the puzzle in 1953, proposing that DNA takes the form of a double helix, essentially a twisted ladder-like structure composed of two intertwined strands connected by pairs of chemical bases. Their landmark proposal, however, relied heavily and controversially on X-ray diffraction images produced by another researcher, whose crucial experimental data was shared with the two researchers without her full knowledge or explicit consent, a fact that has become the subject of considerable historical and ethical debate regarding proper scientific credit and attribution. The double helix structure elegantly and immediately explained several previously puzzling aspects of genetics, including precisely how genetic information could be so reliably copied and passed on during cell division, since each strand of the helix could serve as a template for constructing an exact, complementary new strand. This discovery is now widely regarded as one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, laying the essential foundational groundwork for the entire subsequent field of molecular biology and eventually enabling technologies as consequential and far-reaching as genetic engineering and DNA-based forensic analysis.