[Francis H. C. Crick]. Lab Coat....

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[Francis H. C. Crick]. Lab Coat. Made of white cotton and manufactured by Lybro of England, the famed molecular biologist and 1962 Nobel laureate for Physiology or Medicine, Dr. Francis H. C. Crick, has placed his initials, "F. H. C.," in two places on the inside of the collar of his lab coat. Upon the left breast pocket is embroidered a gold spiral, reminiscent of the helical structure of DNA which he co-discovered. The coat shows moderate staining and the buttons have all been removed from down the front. There are three small holes or spots of rubbing, all of which located on the front of the coat.

The coat was most likely used by Dr. Crick in 1961 as he performed his experiments to decode the three bases of one amino acid. According to Matt Ridley in his book, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code: "Those who knew Crick as a theoretician suspected that others had done the experiments while he had cheered them on from the sidelines. But in this case they were wrong. Crick had neatly and diligently ploughed his way through the experiments himself, designing each cross and carefully scoring the result. The paper on the triplet code, 'General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins,' was published in Nature on the penultimate day of 1961, with Barnett, Brenner, and the young physicist Richard Watts-Tobin as coauthors. It remains a landmark in the history of molecular biology, and it is very different from Crick's other papers because it recounts his own experiments." This is an incredible artifact of scientific history.