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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."
...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.
Slap them for selling it. Do not slap them for selling it to the highest bidder.
I already told my parents that if they leave anything for me to inherit, I will sell it. If they want something to be in the family in the future, they should give it NOW to my sister.
If they want somebody else to have it, they should give it NOW to whomever they want to have it.
So if he needs to slap somebody, he should slap himself for not seeing to it that it landed where he thought it should go. Or perhaps he did and he very well knew they would be selling it.
Anyway, it was theirs to do with as they pleased.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
His family is now $2+ million richer in exchange for a chunk of worthless metal that was simply a physical symbol of a non-transferable honor paid to him. What's not to like? I hope my own family can benefit half that much from my collected memorabilia - after I pass on it becomes just a bunch of junk by any objective measure.
Let the history books and ongoing work of his peers honor his works, if his family kept mementos of his life I would hope they would be those that help them remember the man they knew, rather than the work that no doubt pulled him away from them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Meh. It should have gone to Rosalind Franklin, anyway.
Correction
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."