Letter-writing might be out of fashion now, but once upon a time it recorded the twists and turns of history as well as breakthroughs in science.
A letter from a father to his 12-year-old son introducing him to the world of DNA is currently the world's most expensive letter.
But the private buyer who paid US$5.3 million for it at a Christie's auction in New York earlier this year has in hand the first document that talks about the double helix of DNA, the building blocks of the human body, weeks before it was made public in 1953. The letter is from the co-discoverer of DNA, the British scientist Francis Crick, to his 12-year-old son.
With Christie's added premium the letter cost $6,059,750, according to World Record Academy.
For the work Crick, along with James Dewey Watson and Maurice Wilkins, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962.
Written on March 19, 1953, the letter begins:
"My dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery.
"We have built a model for des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read carefully) called DNA for short." Crick even attempted a drawing of the double helix on paper, commenting: "The model looks much nicer than this".
The letter is among the artefacts that the Crick family is selling to fund scientific research, including at Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where Crick was a professor, and the Francis Crick Institute in London, a medical research facility that is expected to open in 2015, according to the Daily Mail newspaper. Other artefacts being auctioned include Crick's endorsed Nobel Prize cheque for 85,739,88 Swedish krona dating from December 10, 1962, and his stained, white lab coat.
The seven-page letter tries to explain to a child a discovery that would redefine genetics.
"Our structure is very beautiful," Crick writes of the double helix. "DNA can be thought of roughly as a very long chain with flat bits sticking out. The flat bits are called the bases."
Q&A
Who was Francis Crick?
Crick was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist who in 1953 codiscovered the structure of DNA while he was in Cambridge. He moved to California’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies in 1976.
What are the other expensive letters?
An 1847 letter to wine merchants in Bordeaux, France, fetched 6,123,750 Swiss francs at an auction in 1993 and was one of the most expensive letters to make it to the Guinness world record books. An anonymous buyer snapped up the letter from Mauritius within a minute of it going on the block at a sale in Zürich, Switzerland, according to the World Record Academy. A letter dating from 1787 from the first US president George Washington in 1787 to his nephew Bushrod Washington asking him to adopt the country’s new constitution was sold for $3.2 million at Christie’s in New York.
The letter writing industry might be a sinking ship but anything from a real-life disaster?
Those written from the Titanic are the most collected items associated with the ship. It struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic and sank with 1,500 people on board. The most expensive letter written from the Titanic is that from a first class passenger Adolphe Saafeld, a businessman and a Titanic survivor from Manchester, to his "wifey". The letter dating April 10, 1912, sold for £55,000 (Dh310,802).
