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Crick's Nobel Medal Fetches $2.3 Million At Auction
ananyo writes "Francis Crick's Nobel medal fetched US$2.27 million at an auction in New York yesterday. The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of 'Biomobie' a company that intends to sell walnut-sized, flying-saucer-shaped electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers. The closely-watched sale featured a range of Crick memorabilia that the family had kept in storage for many years. Up for auction along with the medal — awarded for Crick's role in the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA — were his lab coat, sailing logbooks and garden journals. Expectations were high because the day before, auctioneer Christie's had brokered the sale of a letter from Crick (PDF) to his 12-year-old son for $6 million, more than triple the pre-sale estimate. The letter went to an anonymous bidder. The new owner of the Crick medal is a Chinese-born American who says his motivation for purchasing the medal was to stimulate research into the 'mystery of Bioboosti,' which, he says, produces electromagnetic stimulation that can 'control and enable the regeneration of damaged organs.' Those benefits are, needless to say, so far unproven. Crick's family has said it will donate at least 20% of the proceeds from the sale of the medal and other items to the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research centre scheduled to open in London in 2015."
So basically a quack bought his medal?
...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.
The money can actually help people.
Buying a nobel medal is exactly the same as earning one. It's articles like this that remind me how soulless people with large amounts of money can be.
I would come back from the dead to slap my descendants for allowing this guy to have my Nobel price.
Taking bets that somehow, somewhere, these items will be used to market his products.
And we'll have the folks who are duped by spurious claims to point and think or justify to their skeptical friends, "See! A Noble prize winner is associated with this!"
1000000 -1 that nothing comes of it.
"That belongs in a museum!"
Koans and fables for the software engineer
I guess that is a reasonable sum for a worldwide advertising campaign.
What intrigues me is the fact that when I search Bioboosti/Biomobie, nothing much interesting comes up about that company. I wonder how Jack Wang is funding his company. I also want to know more about this mysterious new owner. Does he have any link to the top brasses in China?
Cricks received this medal for reaching the pinnacle of science research at his time. Now the medal is going to be given to a quack...
Wow, this is just like the "No, You Can't Name That Exoplanet" article. Idiot believes object has mysterious powers: both the Crick Nobel medal and the wacky magna-doofuck-oodle are the objects. Or maybe the guy is like L. Ron Hubbard: he knows his magnets are crap, but he believes that being the current holder of the "Francis Crick Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology" confers upon him the special power of marketing and he can convince morons to buy his crap. "Why what I say must be true!! They wouldn't sell this Authentic Nobel Prize Medal to just anyone with enough money, would they?"
.
It's the same as idiots believing in religious relics, or copper wrist-bands, or magnets along your skin, or even that quacky "blue tape" for atheletes that idiots put on their arms and legs at the olympics thinking the blue tape would give them magic healing abilities.
"In April 2013 J. Wang received the medal for outstanding achievements in biology from the estate of Francis Crick, the famous inventor of the DNA"
It's a bit rough with details - Hey, it would be too long to write out "famous biologist, renowned for etc."! - but technically true, right? And it will fit nicely in our ads and on cover of our booklets.
That same auction featured a lot of interesting science fiction first editions, including a true first of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that went for $43,750, and an inscribed first of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds went for $35,000.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
that the specific price realized at auction for Francis' medal is likely to be several times what the buyer's creditors will obtain for same once the company goes under.
Disappointed that you missed the auction? Don't worry - it'll be back up on the block soon enough...
That guy was on LSD when he made the discovery!!
It appears that this Jack Wang can claim to have a Nobel medal in his advertising and he would be syntactically correct !!!
WTF.
I dont understand all the hype about Watson & Crick .. Linus Pauling or Bragg were going to get there too after they recovered from their errors (they didn't have Rosalinds photos). Furthermore, we already knew about DNA, they just figured out its structure .. which is important .. well F it I am going to say it's not THAT important compared to knowing for example .. that DNA exists, that DNA is a sequences of nucleotides etc. Who actually discovered DNA? Who actually discovered that DNA contains the genetic code? Few people know. Actually I had to wikipedia it myself, cause teachers don't tell you and books don't cover it.