Later it was found that the sugar in nucleic acid can be ribose or deoxyribose ... Scientists still needed to figure out this molecule's structure to be sure, and to understand how it worked.

In fact, Watson and Crick were worried that they would be "scooped" by Pauling, who proposed a different model for the three-dimensional structure of DNA just months before they did. In the end ...

Researchers were investigating the wound-healing properties of deoxyribose, a sugar critical in the structure of DNA ... driven hair loss—a common model for male-pattern baldness—were selected.

This relatively simple structure revealed a great deal about its function to scientists like Francis Crick, who predicted the existence of the "central dogma" from the model. 1.1 Discovery of DNA ...