A letter bursting with life — from a scientist telling his 12-year-old son that he and a colleague had discovered the structure of DNA — is going under the hammer here next week.
Francis Crick’s 1953 “secret of life’’ missive to his son, Michael, outlined his and Jim Watson’s theory of the double-helix code, “the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life’’ about a month before their landmark research was published.
“Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery,’’ is how the 7-page hand-written letter, complete with diagrams begins.
It’s expected to fetch $1 million to $2 million when it goes up for auction at Christie’s here on Wednesday.
“It has the wow factor,’’ said Francis Wahlgren, Christie’s international department head of books and manuscripts. “Along with what Einstein did, they’re probably the two most important scientific advances of the 20th century.’’
The British scientist explains to his son, who is away at boarding school, in an easy-to-understand way: “We have built a model for the structure of de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid (read it carefully) called D.N.A.”
He said DNA could be thought of as a “very long chain with flat bits sticking out’’ called bases.
Crick tells his son that “now we believe that the D.N.A. is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another).’’
He asked Michael to “read this carefully so that you understand it. When you come home we will show you the model.’’ It’s signed, “Lots of love, Daddy.’’
Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Crick died in 2004. Michael Crick, now 72, says he will donate half the proceeds from the letter’s sale to the Salk Institute.