Final answer:
Linus Pauling, a prominent scientist and Nobel laureate, was also close in discovering the structure of DNA but his proposed model was incorrect. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA's double helix structure was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, with Watson and Crick largely building upon the X-ray diffraction images produced in Maurice Wilkins' lab by Rosalind Franklin.
Step-by-step explanation:
In the 1950s, the race to discover the structure of DNA was a focal point in the field of molecular biology. While Francis Crick and James Watson ultimately succeeded in discovering the double helix structure, other scientists were also very close to this groundbreaking discovery.
One of these scientists was Linus Pauling, an American biochemist who had previously elucidated the secondary structure of proteins and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. Pauling had proposed a triple-stranded model of DNA based on his research, but this model turned out to be incorrect. However, at the same time, Maurice Wilkins' lab, with researcher Rosalind Franklin using X-ray diffraction, produced more defined images of DNA that were crucial to the correct model proposed by Watson and Crick. Despite this, in 1962, only Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, since Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously and Franklin had unfortunately passed away.