Search Here

Dr Francis Crick's letter which was sent to his 12 year old son sixty years ago will be auctioned in Christie's in New York in April 10, 2013.

The letter is expected to be sold for more than a million dollar according to Christie's estimation.

The letter will be sold along with a set of hand-drawn diagrams. The letter was written on March 19, 1953 which describes how he and James Watson found the copying mechanism "by which life comes from life." It includes a simple sketch of DNA's double helix structure which Crick concedes he can't draw very well. He was back then a biologist at Cambridge University’s Medical Research Council Council.

In the letter, which is signed “Lots of love, Daddy,” Dr Crick wrote:

“We have built a model for the structure of des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid, (read it carefully) called DNA for short.”

The finding was published a month later in the journal Nature.

He, Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were jointly won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Half the auction's proceeds will benefit the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

His son Michael Crick, who is now 72 and lives in Seattle, said: "On March 19 my father wrote to me describing the model and its implications. I was 12 at the time and away at Bedales – a British boarding school."

Michael is a pioneer designer of computer games whose current project is a puzzle called Cricklers that appears in newspapers including The Washington Post.

Francis Crick was born in 8 June 1916  and died at the age of 88 in 2004.