| Sven Verner Furberg | |
| Birth Name: | Sven Verner Furberg |
| Birth Date: | 16 April 1920 |
| Birth Place: | Sande, Vestfold, Norway |
| Death Place: | Oslo, Norway |
| Nationality: | Norwegian |
| Thesis Title: | An X-ray Study of Some Nucleosides and Nucleotides. |
| Thesis Url: | http://www.nb.no/nbsok/nb/f3aa07ed15adc0ef0926c5edc17c1ca5?index=1 |
| Thesis Year: | 1949 |
| Known For: | The Structure of cytidine |
Sven Verner Furberg (16 April 1920 – 15 March 1983) was a Norwegian chemist, biologist, and crystallographer who first proposed a helical structure for DNA. Furberg suggested a single-chain helical structure in 1949, which he referred to as a "zig-zag" chain. In 1952, his structure of DNA was published in the journal Acta Chemica Scandinavica. In this paper, he deduced that DNA forms a helix from the crystal structure and density value of nucleosides and other related molecules. A year later (in 1953), this paper was cited by James Watson and Francis Crick in Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.