Crick DNA Nobel Medal Auctioned for $2 Million

This story was updated at 12:45 p.m. ET to include the buyer's name and comments from Crick's son and granddaughter.

A Nobel Prize medal honoring the discovery of DNA's twisted ladder shape was sold at auction today (April 11) in New York for more than $2 million.

Francis Crick was one of three men awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the DNA molecule's double-helix structure in 1953. Sixty years after the discovery, the CEO of a Chinese biomedical firm paid $2,270,500 for Crick's medal and accompanying diploma at Heritage Auctions.

At a separate sale yesterday, a letter penned by Crick set the world record for any letter ever sold at auction. An anonymous bidder paid just over $6 million for the note Crick wrote to his 12-year-old son that explained the DNA discovery and was signed "lots of love, Daddy." The previous record was set in 2008 when someone paid $3.4 million for an anti-slavery letter written by Abraham Lincoln.

"It's a win for science worldwide," Kindra Crick, granddaughter of the famous researcher, told LiveScience today after the auction.

A chunk of the proceeds from this week's sales are set to benefit research institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Crick's family and Heritage Auctions plan to donate a portion of today's earnings to The Francis Crick Institute, a medical research institute, scheduled to open in London in 2015. And some of the proceeds from yesterday's letter auction are set go to the Salk Institute in California, where Crick, who died in 2004, studied consciousness later in his career. [See Photos of Crick's Medal & Other Auction Items]

There was little precedent for today's sale. Heritage Auctions had valued the Nobel medal and diploma at $500,000 a fourth of what it raked in. Nobel medals appear to have changed hands publicly in only a couple of instances and none had been publicly auctioned off before. Crick's medal might be considered particularly valuable as it honored one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

As early as the late 1800s, scientists knew that the DNA molecule existed, but not what it looked like or its true function. The discovery of DNA's double helix structure was key to understanding how the molecule worked as a code for genes.

The medal and diploma were bought by Jack Wang, the CEO of Biomobie, a biomedical company based in Shanghai. Wang flew to New York for the auction and said in a statement that he hopes the objects will inspire discoveries that "recover damaged human organs and retard the aging process, achieving the goal of self recovering from disease and poor health conditions."

Kindra Crick said she was confident the buyer would carry on her grandfather's "vision of going after profound discovery" and said he was interested in displaying the medal publicly.

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Crick DNA Nobel Medal Auctioned for $2 Million