DNA pioneer Francis Crick’s letter auctioned for $5.3mln

PanARMENIAN.Net - A letter written by scientist Francis Crick describing his discovery of the double helix shape of DNA has been sold for $5.3 million, according to BBC News.

An anonymous buyer purchased it at a New York auction on Wednesday, April 10.

Crick wrote to his 12-year-old son Michael in March 1953 describing the discovery and including a sketch.

The Nobel Prize medal given to Crick for the breakthrough is expected to fetch between $500,000 and "several million" at auction later.

Professor Crick, who died aged 88 in 2004, helped discover the "secret of life" at Cambridge University in 1953.

In the seven-page letter Crick told how he and James Watson found the copying mechanism "by which life comes from life". It was written more than a month before the pair officially published their work.

The letter began: "My dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery. We have built a model for des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read carefully) called DNA for short."

He described it as a "beautiful" structure and included a sketch of it, underneath which he wrote: "The model looks much nicer than this. The letter concluded: "Read this carefully so that you will understand it. When you come home we will show you the model."

The letter was expected to fetch about $1m (£652,000), a spokesman for Christie's said. It was a record for a letter sold at auction, he added.

Crick, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, was given the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for "discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

The medal will be sold later at Heritage Auctions in New York together with the cheque and diploma Crick received as part of the prize and one of his lab coats, which has "various stains on it".

His family will donate 20% of the profit to researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London.