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For Sale: One Nobel Prize Medal (Slightly Used, By Francis Crick)
Hugh Pickens writes "UPI reports that for the first time in the history of Nobel Prize, one of the Nobel Prize medals, along with the diploma presented by the Nobel committee, is on auction — with an opening bid of $250,000. Awarded to Francis Crick, who along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 'for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material,' the medal will be auctioned off in New York City, by Heritage Auctions. The medal has been kept in a safe deposit box in California since Crick's widow passed away in 2007 and a portion of the proceeds will go to the Francis Crick Institute of disease research scheduled to open in London in 2015. '"By auctioning his Nobel it will finally be made available for public display and be well looked after. Our hope is that, by having it available for display, it can be an inspiration to the next generation of scientists," says Crick's granddaughter, Kindra Crick. "My granddad was honored to have received the Nobel Prize, but he was not the type to display his awards; his office walls contained a large chalkboard, artwork and a portrait of Charles Darwin."'"
To be honest, Crick was a bit of a git anyway (and Watson wasn't exactly what you might call a gentleman). They basically stole someone else's unpublished scientific work to confirm their own data (mainly, it has to be said, because she was only a woman) and without which they'd have ended up with entirely the wrong model. They were loathe to credit her, even after her death, even though others did.
Not saying they *didn't* do a lot of the work, but without her observations, comments, and years of working on data, they'd have been lost for quite a while longer than they were.
It would be great to buy this and donate it to the Rosalind Franklin Society ... http://www.rosalindfranklinsociety.org/
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
Here is a link to the item, it is being auctioned off by Heritage Auctions: http://historical.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=6093&lotIdNo=50001
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Crick may have been a brilliant microbiologist, but he certainly doesn't know shit about business.
Well, to be fair to Dr. Crick, he's been dead since 2004, so knowing much of anything is probably a pretty big challenge for him.
For those wondering who this post is referring to, that would be Rosalind Franklin.
Kissinger, like him or loathe him, actually DID something on the world stage BEFORE he got the award including the actual negotiation of peace accords, even though the accords ultimately failed to succeed.
Obama was a not even inaugurated President-elect whose main achievement was being in the U.S. Senate for a couple of years and having one kickass campaign PR team.
You can make a good argument why Kissinger was overrated, but I was absolutely stunned that Obama got an award not even for trying to bring peace, but simply promising to do so.
The Peace Prize is definitely a different category of award than the others, and it has a tendency to become political due simply to the subject matter, but they used to at least point to actual work or achievements, the quality of those actions admittedly being up for argument.
Perhaps the family of Dr. Crick reexamined the value of a Nobel Prize when a Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Barack Obama
What exactly is the problem with you people who can't tell the difference between the Nobel Peace prize and the prizes for Physics, Chemistry, or Medicine? What makes you think the two categories have anything to do with one another, either administratively or politically? They could give the Peace prize to Bashar Assad this fall and it would still have zero relevance to the worth of the chemistry prize.