DNA discoverer Crick's Nobel, Letter Fetch Millions at Auction
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Nobel Prize medal won by Francis Crick, the co- discoverer of DNA, sold for $2.27 million at auction on Thursday, a day after a letter in which Crick outlined the achievement to his young son became the most expensive letter ever auctioned when it fetched more than $6 million.
…
Crick’s Nobel medal sold for $2,270,500, Heritage Auctions said, or more than four times the pre-sale estimate. It did not identify the buyer.
….
On Wednesday, the price of a seven-page handwritten letter from 1953 in which Crick, then 33, described the discovery to his young son who was away at boarding school, soared to $6,059,750 when it was auctioned at Christie’s.
…..
Christie’s had estimated the Crick letter, which was being sold by Crick’s son, would sell for between $1 million and $2 million. In it, Crick wrote that he believed DNA is a code and that the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another.
Crick went on to work as a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and died in 2004.
It does not sound like a happy story despite all those million dollar numbers mentioned here and there. Everything is for sell these days. What happened to family honor?
