San Diego

The auction of an historic archive of molecular-biology documents, planned for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the DNA double helix, is drawing fire from scientists.

Top researchers who sold papers to a private California archive on the understanding that they would be kept together in a single, accessible collection are angry that Christie's plans to sell the papers as separate lots. And a collector who gathered the works together is threatening legal action to block the sale.

Christie's is scheduling the sale of 56 lots from the Jeremy Norman Molecular Biology Archive for 25 April in New York, 50 years to the day after Nature published Crick and Watson's paper describing the double helix.

It values the documents at between $2.2 million and $3.3 million. The lots include documents from Aaron Klug, Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and James Watson. One lot is a signed galley proof of Crick and Watson's Nature paper.

“It is an outrage,” says Klug, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1982 for developing crystallographic electron microscopy. “We were given promises, assurances, that the whole collection would be kept together.”

Norman declined to be interviewed, saying only that the sale “will be handled appropriately”. Christie's officials say that Norman has title to the documents, and that a bid for the entire collection would be willingly entertained.

But Al Seckel, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and an amateur collector who purchased the documents for Norman, was furious when he learned of the auction. “This impacts on my reputation,” he says.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Seckel travelled to Europe to buy molecular-biology papers, which he sold to Norman, a book dealer in San Francisco. Both men said they wanted to create an archive that transcends national borders, putting the history of DNA under one roof, probably at Caltech. For each purchase of papers and sale to Norman, Seckel says there are specific agreements that the documents will be kept together for scholarly work.

But Francis Wahlgren, head of Christie's books and manuscripts department, says that he is “not aware of any agreement”. Norman no longer wanted to be responsible for the archive, he adds. In June 2001, Nature reported concern among archivists that the documents might someday be sold at auction, which at the time Norman denied would happen (see Nature 411, 732; 2001).

Norman's archive plans seem to have changed after his failed 2001 effort to acquire Crick's entire document collection. When the sale collapsed, the Wellcome Library in London stepped in to buy them for US$2.8 million in November 2001.

Last week, Seckel tried unsuccessfully to persuade Christie's to stop the sale. He says he will go to court if necessary to block it.

David Pearson, the Wellcome's librarian, says: “Our concern is that very important papers may be disbursed in the private market.” The Wellcome is considering its options, he adds.