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A letter from Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick to his son describing his discovery of DNA went under the hammer for a record $ 6 million on Wednesday, auction house Christie’s said.
The biologist wrote the letter to his 12-year-old son Michael Crick in 1953, days before announcing the discovery of DNA which would earn him and research partner James Watson a joint Nobel Prize in 1962.
Crick tells his son that it is the first time anyone has documented “how life comes from life,” and sketches the now-famous double helix shape of DNA.
The letter sold for more than three times its estimate, and his family will use half the proceeds to fund scientific research in Crick’s honour. Crick died in 2004 at the age of 88.
“I’m sort of in a state of shock,” Michael Crick told NBC News. “The family is calling me ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’”.
Crick’s Nobel Prize and other artifacts were to be auctioned on Thursday.
The previous record was $ 3.4 million for an Abraham Lincoln's letter in 2008.
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