In 1951, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “The Structure of Proteins.” Taking yet another Einsteinian leap, Pauling showed that proteins folded upon themselves in recognizable patterns. At the time of publication, scientists knew that proteins were made of a series of linked amino acids. But they hadn’t envisioned what proteins looked like in three dimensions. Pauling did. One of the protein structures Pauling described was called the alpha helix, a finding that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to solve the structure of DNA: nature’s
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They didn't 'solve' anything; they found Rosalind Franklin's notes.
