The 1962 Nobel Prize James Watson won for his role in the discovery of the structure of DNA is going on the auction block. The auctioneer says the gold medal could bring $2.5 to $3.5 million on auction tomorrow. He will become will become the first Nobel recipient to sell the medal in his or her lifetime/

Watson made the 1953 discovery with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.  His role ion the discovery has been controversial.  The work was based on X ray crystallography by Rosalind Franklin, then a fellow in Wilkins lab.  Watson found the X ray images in Dr. Franklin’s lab and brought them to Cambridge for interpretation by Francis Crick, a brilliant theorist and cryptologist. Sadly, Dr. Franklin died to early to win her award, which is given only to living recipients.

Now Dr. Watson claims that financial pressures force him to sell.  According to Dr. Watson, these pressures result from from comments he made in 2007. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Watson said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really    According to the Nobelist,  anyone “who [has] to deal with black employees [finds] this not true.”  Later he claimed these remarks were  “not racist in a conventional way,” and that the interviewer  “somehow wrote that I worried about people in Africa because of their low IQ — and you’re not supposed to say that.”

Now, Watson says “No one really wants to admit I exist.  I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income.”

The auctioneer handling Watson’s auction, Francis Wahlgren, said . “I think the guy is the greatest living scientist. ”  As someone who has known Dr. Watson in a limited ay for 50 years and known a lot of other scientists, I respectfully disagree.