Crick's Nobel Medal Fetches $2.3 Million At Auction 53
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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Exactly, James Randi has already outed this fraud on the JREF site.
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I suspect that your post in the comments section outing him as a fraud will get more views than Randi's blog post.
Undoubtedly, your post will more views by those who need to see it most!
They should have raised the price... (Score:2, Insightful)
...by an order of magnitude, once they realized the buyer was a science-hating scammer. Crick would be pissed.
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Re:They should have raised the price... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is powerless against its arch-enemy, Popular Bullshit :-(
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Look at it this way, the scammer has 3 million less dollars now.
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...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?
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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!"
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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.
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Re:They should have raised the price... (Score:5, Interesting)
He liked Chinese, ....
He liked their tiny little trees,
Their yen, their ping-pong, their yin and yangese
(I'll shut up now but for what I recall having met him at a single, wine fueled dinner, he liked Oriental cultures and people. He sided with Shockley / Jensen about the genetic nature of intelligence but wasn't seemingly all that wound up about it. You may be confusing Crick with James Watson who was openly and shockingly racist and got tossed off the lecture circuit and out of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory [blogspot.com].)
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Click was lacist? [youtube.com]
Perfectly legit (Score:2)
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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire [wikipedia.org]
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Correction [wikipedia.org]
If I was Crick... (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, the "fool" hasn't lost much (unlike the suckers he scams into buying his magic beans): he's got the medal, which he could presumably sell for nearly what he paid to the runner-up in the auction. In the meantime, the "fool" gets free advertizing for his medical scams. The Crick estate should give the Wang a cheesy gold-plated cast-lead knockoff of the medal, in honor of the authenticity of Wang's own "medical products".
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I would come back from the dead to slap my descendants for allowing this guy to have my Nobel price.
A nobel prize for the discovery of DNA goes to a modern day charlatan making money off the uneducated population. Well done - Crick family - well done. I hope you're proud.
Regression to the mean?
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Cue Indiana Jones... (Score:2)
"That belongs in a museum!"
How did the quack get so much money anyway? (Score:2)
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?
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The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers.
Now he might occasionally live in the US, since the summary claims that he's a "Chinese-born American". But the only evidence for that citizenship is a claim made by Jack Wang himself.
I am not sure if Cricks would be happy... (Score:2)
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...
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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
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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.
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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
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Another minute, another sucker born... (Score:2)
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FTFY.
Interesting SF First Editions in that Auction (Score:2)
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.
So can Jack Wang claim to have a Nobel medal now ? (Score:2)
$2.3 for someone else's medal? (Score:2)
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