Russian purchaser to give $4.75M Nobel medal back to DNA pioneer James Watson
James Watson, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA, will finally get his 23-carat gold Nobel medal back from the Russian purchaser who bought it for 4.75 million dollars.
Watson’s medal went up for auction at Christie’s in New York, where it was sold by telephone auction to Alisher Usmanov, owner of the English football club Arsenal and the richest man in Russia and England.
Watson is controversial for many reasons. Most recently he made a series of racist 2007 comments about the intelligence of Africans .. 
comments that were an absurd racist misstement about how we know genetics works. Watson’s biography, The Double Helix, offended many scientists because he hugely exaggerated his own role, so much so that many today think he discovered DNA or discovered that DNA was the basis for heredity. The real names of the scientists who did these things are lost from the public’s attention. Even worse, Watson’s book mistreated Rosalind Franklin, the young scientist whose X-ray data was the keg to solving the DNA structure. Nobels are only given to living scientists. Franklin died of cancer before the prize was awarded and never, in he her lifetime, got the credit she deserved.
Watson got 4.1 million dollars from the auction, said while putting his medal up for sale that he wanted to reenter public life. Alisher Usmanov said he was returning the medal to its owner because he felt sorry that one of the great scientists of all time needed the money.