Final answer:
James Watson and Francis Crick are credited with the discovery of the DNA double helix in the 1950s, building on Rosalind Franklin's X-ray crystallography work and Erwin Chargaff's rules, about a decade after key discoveries in the 1940s.
Step-by-step explanation:
After DNA was found to be the genetic material, there was a significant period during which scientists worked to uncover its structure. The groundbreaking discovery of the DNA double helix shape, similar to a spiral staircase, was made by James Watson and Francis Crick in the 1950s, with essential contributions from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, who used X-ray crystallography to study DNA's structure. The discernment of DNA's structure was a pivotal moment in biology and genetics, as it allowed scientists to understand how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information.
Watson and Crick's model of the double helix, revealed in 1953, occurred after decades of research and following key insights such as those from Chargaff's rules, which illustrated the pairing regularities of DNA bases. This contributed to understanding that DNA, not proteins, carries genetic information, culminating in the depiction of the structure approximately a decade after the foundational work of scientists like Erwin Chargaff and the DNA-polymer discoveries of the 1940s.