James Watson's Nobel Prize for DNA work going on auction block

NEW YORK, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- James Watson will become the first living Nobel laureate to sell his prize when the gold medal he was awarded for the discovery of DNA structure is auctioned in New York.

The prize could sell for as much as $3.5 million next week at Christie's in New York. Watson plans to use the proceeds to fund scientific research.

Watson, a native of Chicago, was a young researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England when he met his collaborator, Francis Crick. He told CNN in a 2013 interview that Crick was the first person he met who shared his conviction of the importance of DNA.

Within a short time, they determined that DNA, the protein that forms genes, has a double helix structure.

"All we could say when we got it: It's so beautiful!" Watson said. "DNA was my only gold rush."

Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins of King's College in London, who had made important contributions in DNA research, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1962.

Watson's notes for his acceptance speech and the manuscript of the lecture are also to be sold.

Crick died in 2004. A letter he wrote his son, Secret of Life, which explained the DNA structure days before the official announcement of the discovery, was sold last year for a record $6.06 million.

Watson, 86, is chancellor emeritus of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State. He said in a statement that the money from the sale would help him "in keeping the academic world an environment where great ideas and decency prevail."

"I look forward to making further philanthropic gifts to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and Clare College Cambridge," he said.

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James Watson's Nobel Prize for DNA work going on auction block