Nobel Prize Winner's Letter Beats Abraham Lincoln's and Fetches over $6M at NY Auction

A New York auction house saw today (Wednesday) a 60-year-old letter beat Abraham Lincoln letter and fetching $5.3 million to its owner.

The letter in question was from no other than the DNA pioneer Francis Crick. Written to his son, Michael Francis, the letter was an attempt of the biologist to share with his then 12-year-old boy the DNA's double-helix structure, weeks before the Nobel Prize-winning discovery was revealed to the world.

"The DNA structure is something beautiful," the biologist says in the hand-written recording-breaking letter.

After being locked up in a safe deposit somewhere in California, an anonymous buyer has dispensed for it a total amount of 6.1 million (including commission), almost double of what Abraham Lincoln's one got in 2008 - $3.4 million (after commission).

Crick's granddaughter, Kindra, explained her family's decision to auction her grandfather's medal and other items as to raise funds for research institutions in the United States and United Kingdom.

Tomorrow (Thursday) Crick's Nobel Prize medal in physiology or medicine goes on sale. The auction house, Heritage Auctions, estimates the medal could fetch over $500,000.

The letter is a milestone in mankind scientific journey. It marks the moment humanity (in the form of Crick and his friend and colleague James Watson) discovered the copying mechanism "by which life comes from life." The half-decade old letter even includes a simple diagram of DNA's double helix structure.

Crick's son, Michael, was 12 when that letter to him was addressed. The tone in it is very paternal, clearly expressed in the way it ends:

"Read this carefully so that you will understand it. When you come home we will show you the model. Lots of love, Daddy."

Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins went go on to receive the Nobel Prize for the DNA discovery.

According to Crick's family, about half the proceeds from the Christie's sale will benefit the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. The new Francis Crick Institute in London, a medical research institute slated to open in 2015, will benefit from twenty percent of the money.

After spending decades as a brain researcher at the Salk Institute, Francis Crick died in 2004. He was 88.