San Diego

A historic archive of molecular-biology papers will not be broken up and sold, as planned, at auction next month. Jeremy Norman, the California-based owner of the archive, said that he hopes instead to keep it intact and sell it to a library.

The auction house Christie's announced on 4 March that it was cancelling the auction in New York of the Jeremy Norman Molecular Biology Archive. Including papers from Aaron Klug, Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and James Watson, the archive was valued for Christie's at between $2.2 million and $3.3 million.

“Christie's is offering my collection en bloc to various institutional libraries in England and the United States,” Norman said in a statement. “Several institutions have expressed interest and we are pursuing a private sale.”

“I am glad that Christie's has withdrawn the auction,” says Klug, who sold his papers to the archive on the basis of an agreement that they would be kept together.

When the proposed sale, scheduled for 25 April, was disclosed last month, Klug and others expressed anger that the papers were to be split up (see Nature 421, 564; 200310.1038/421564a).

Al Seckel, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who purchased the papers for Norman, said that the auction was cancelled after his extensive documentation prohibiting breaking up the archive was brought to the attention of Christie's. Neither Christie's nor Norman would comment on why the sale was cancelled.