To hit the block Thursday! http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/james-watson-sell-nobel-prize
Here's the link to the Christies auction. Other items include speech manuscripts and other stuff. I didn't look through it all yet. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/salebrowse.aspx?intSaleid=25779&viewType=list
This is cool. I guess it shouldn't be all that much of a surprise given the topic that won him the Nobel Medal. The folks he worked with are a veritable who's who of molecular biology and it reminds me of someone being in the right place at the right time who was also absolutely prepared for the circumstances. The book Recombinant DNA, written James Watson with Michael Gilman, Jan Witkowski and Mark Zoller, got me through graduate school. I was a scuffling graduate student at Columbia University pounding my head against the wall in a genetics course taught by Martin Chalfie, which was based heavily on the transmission genetics work of Marty's thesis advisor, Sydney Brenner (Sydney would also go on to win the Nobel Prize, in 2002). I had multiple degrees in chemistry and had never taken either molecular biology or genetics when Marty handed me his personal copy of Recombinant DNA one afternoon while we spoke in his office. He told me to take the book and use it and that with my background it would be trivial for me to learn molecular biology. It saved my scientific life. Marty could have easily brushed me off since he was knee deep in the early stages of green fluorescent protein (GFP) and this work would earn Marty his own Nobel Prize in 2008. I still have the book and it is, in fact, at my side as I type this response. Every time I look at it I think of James Watson, Sydney Brenner and Marty Chalfie (all three of whom have now won the Nobel Prize and one whom I consider a friend). I don't know James Watson, though I have attended lectures given by him and have casually spoken to him, but the work that went into all of this was absolutely stunning.
