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The Almighty Buck Science

Crick's Nobel Medal Fetches $2.3 Million At Auction 53

Posted by Soulskill from the with-a-side-of-crazy dept.
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."
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Crick's Nobel Medal Fetches $2.3 Million At Auction More

Crick's Nobel Medal Fetches $2.3 Million At Auction

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  • They should have raised the price... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.

    • I totally agree. I feel sad for science now that this guy has one of the truly greats Nobel Medals.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Look at it this way, the scammer has 3 million less dollars now.

    • ...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.

      Don't you think that Crick would have been amused to see a quack shell out good money for a little chunk of metal that(outside of its honorary context) isn't worth nearly what he paid?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        He got some nice PR out of it for his quack product, that I bet he's selling for a nice lump of cash each.
        I wouldn't bet on him being on the bottom of the chump pyramid.

        If you're amused by that, I think you're the kind of optimist who, when I piss on your grave, would say "Ha, ha, now you're dehydrated!"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khallow ( 566160 )

          I think you're the kind of optimist who, when I piss on your grave, would say "Ha, ha, now you're dehydrated!"

          I imagine he wouldn't say anything at all. Being dead and all.

    • I imagine he'd be more pissed he was born in China. Crick was kinda racists.

  • 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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • "That belongs in a museum!"

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      I imagine anyone in China who can just drop $2.3 million on a piece of medal has some sort of connection with the brass, if only because they do business with state and crony-owned firms.

  • 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...

    • 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 kne

      • 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.

        Well, you said it yourself, that piece of metal is worth "$2+ million". It probably would be worth more, if his family keep it for longer.

        • Perhaps, the market for collectibles can be somewhat unpredictable. And you must factor in the growth potential of the money as well - a multi-million dollar purse opens many opportunities not available to most poeple - invested wisely it could almost certainly grow much faster than the market for a historical memento.

          Also, be careful about conflating worth with market price - the two are largely unrelated to each other. At one extreme I challenge you to find anything with a greater worth or lower price t

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      Meh. It should have gone to Rosalind Franklin, anyway.
  • 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

    • It's the same as idiots believing in religious relics, or copper wrist-bands, or magnets along your skin, or the intrinsic value of bitcoins.

      FTFY.

  • That same auction featured a lot of interesting science fiction first editions [lawrenceperson.com], 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.

  • 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 th

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