Biotech Company to Auction Chances to Clone a Dog

A California company is planning a string of online auctions next month to clone five dogs, with the bidding to start at $100,000.

Scientists consider dogs among the most difficult animals to clone because they have an unusual reproductive biology, more so than humans. But the company behind the auctions, BioArts International, maintains that the technology is ready, and it is calling the dog cloning project Best Friends Again. It has scheduled the auctions for June 18.

The opening and closing times for the auctions would be staggered, to reach potential customers in different time zones, and that the starting bids for the later auctions would be higher “to steer people to participate in the earlier auctions if they can, and avoid a phenomenon of everyone waiting to see how they go.”

But Dr. Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company with laboratories in Worcester, Mass., voiced concern when a reporter described Best Friends Again.

“If anyone thinks they’re going to get Fluffy back,” Dr. Lanza said, “they’re gravely mistaken.” A cloned dog is “likely to be a totally unknown dog, just as if you went to the pound and adopted another, unknown animal.”

Queen Mary WW11 ID Card for auction

An ID card issued to Queen Mary is to be sold at auction in Lichfield. The National Registration card, numbered ODPH/180/1 and issued on May 22, 1940, is signed “Mary, Her Majesty Queen”.

The three-page document survived because an Army officer assigned to shred cards after the war kept it as a memento.

Hanson’s auctioneers of Lichfield, Staffordshire, expect it to fetch £500.

Don’t be surprised if it makes more!

Auction info www.hansonsauctioneers.co.uk

A TON OF CAVIAR FOR AUCTION.

Iran is to auction a ton of caviar, in the United Kingdom at an expected price of $10m.

Caviar which is Sturgeon eggs have a market value of nearly $1,000 per 50g, the sale also includes 700kg of ossetra caviar and 100kg of sevruga caviar.

The Caspian Sea produces 90 per cent of the world’s caviar, harvested by Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia.

Russia is the biggest consumer.

Einstein letter auctioned for record £207,600

A letter by Albert Einstein was sold this week at Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair, London, for a world record £207,600.

The letter, written in German in 1954 to philosopher Eric Gutkind, was sold to a private collector. Extra phone lines had to be installed to cope with worldwide interest.

It was expected to fetch up to £8,000.

In the letter, Einstein, who was Jewish, rejects the notion that Jews were God’s chosen people

Madonna lip gloss at AIDS Auction

A benefit on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival last Thursday raised more than $10 million for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), a record for the annual event.

Sharon Stone was the auctioneer.

Madonna emptied her purse and came up with a magnifying mirror, hair clips, skin blotting tissues and lip gloss. She put it on the block along with a one-of-a-kind diamond-encrusted alligator bag donated by Chanel. The lot sold for $472,000.
The 49-year-old singer asked the crowd not to insult her with low bids: "This lip gloss touched my lips."

The event was held at the Moulin de Mougins outside Cannes.

Olympic Torch for Auction

An Olympic Torches used in 1948 to carry the Olympic Flame onto British soil for the first time will highlight in Bonhams sporting memorabilia sale in Chester on 4 June 2008. The torch, which carried the flame for part of the last stretch of its journey from Greece to Wembley for the opening ceremony of the 1948 London Olympics, is expected to sell for over £2,000.

The torch was carried by British athlete John Jenkin who ran through Canterbury on the penultimate day of the Olympic Torch Relay, before the start of the games on 29 July 1948.

The following inscription is engraved on the side:
“Olympia to London with thanks to the bearer XIVth Olympiad 1948.” It also carries the bearer’s name “John W.I. Jenkin 28th July 1948.”

Chester auction features Linford Christie's running shoes.

In Bonhams ‘Sporting Legends’ sale in Chester on 4 June, is the pair of running shoes that made Linford Christie the fastest man on earth.

In the 100m final of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Christie sprinted to victory in 9.96 seconds, a phenomenal achievement that made him – at 32 – the oldest man ever to win the title.

In an international career spanning 17 years Christie represented his country over 60 times and won more major championship medals than any other British male sprinter. The shoes he wore to win gold in Barcelona are estimated to sell for £600 – 800.


I predict that the bidding will run well past that figure.

Auction info www.bonhams.com

GEORGE BEST PUPPET FOR AUCTION

The Spitting Image puppet of George Best dressed in a Manchester United kit is to be auctioned off along with other personal sporting items at Bonham’s Sporting Legends auction in Chester on 4 June.

The rubber caricature, which has been on display in the National Football Museum at Preston, is expected to make £5,000.

John Lennon Lyrics for London Auction

John Lennon’s lyrics for Give Peace a Chance are to be offered for sale at a London auction.

The lyrics were given to teenage fan Gail Renard during one of his famous “Bed-In” peace protests with his wife Yoko Ono in a Montreal hotel room in 1969.

The lyrics, along with a number of personal photos, are now due to be sold at Christie’s auction house in South Kensington, London.

The collection, including photos which have never been seen in public before, is expected to fetch up to £300,000.

The auction will take place on July 10

Hitler China for Auction

The china set was made by Hutschenreuther, a family firm, in a classic 1930s flo-blue style with gold edging, Nordic signs and a north-star pattern.

It was believed to have been used on board the SS Albert Ballin, built by Blohm and Voss, Hamburg, in 1922 for the Hamburg-American Line.

All the plates and dishes carry the symbol of the “Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler” (LAH), the name of the elite guard, in elaborate gold lettering.

The items are being sold at Henry Aldridge and Son auctioneers in Devizes, Wilts, on May 17, for an estimated £1,000.

Andrew Aldridge said: “They turned up just a few miles from us here and the vendor has no idea how he came by them.

“Hitler’s personal guards - the best of the best - travelled incognito on the ships in case there were any attacks by communists or subversive elements.

“They had the best of everything including their china that included the items we have for sale.

“Some would have posed as crew and others as passengers - they were the equivalent of air marshalls.

“And they would have used these items in their own quarters, so no one would have seen them.

“Collectors of marine memorabilia and second world war memorabilia will be interested so there is a cross over which will help them sell.”

Auction info www.henry-aldridge.co.uk

AUCTIONEER AVAILABLE.

Readers may have noticed a drop-off in postings over the last month or so. This was because, as Coordinator of the London Green Party, I was heavily involved in organising the campaign for the London Assembly.

In 2000, 180,000 votes won us three seats in the 25 seat Assembly. This time, we increased our vote to 203,465 but it was only good enough for two seats. We were just 24,409 short for my seat. Really frustrating!!

I am proud to have been part of what was our best campaign ever. We stood a full slate for the 25 seats and the Mayor. This alone was a considerable logistical and financial operation. I was on the board of London Green News. We published two editions with a print run of 510,000 as well as 600,000 campaign leaflets plus manifestos, mini manifestos, posters etc. The distribution of that lot took a lot of planning and implementation! Our TV broadcast was well received and our media hits were considerable.

I was also involved in the fundraising committee which raised the needed £100,000. This, also took a lot of advance planning. We came out of the election, without debts, probably for the first time ever.

Ah well, back to normal.

ANYONE KNOW OF ANY AUCTIONEER JOBS, OUT THERE? Seeing that I will not now be a high paid Assembly Member, I desperately need to earn a living.

Article in this week's Antiques Trade Gazette.

London’s Green Party candidate has recycled antiques for years

HAVING conducted over 2000 sales, freelance auctioneer Noel Lynch is used to standing on a platform. But on May 1, he will be looking for votes rather than bids as he aims to win a seat in the London Assembly for the Green Party. A swing of just 1.5 per cent would see Mr Lynch returned as the party's third candidate. He sat in the assembly for 13 months before losing out in the 2004 election where the Greens took 8.5 per cent of the vote. But with environmental issues now taking greater prominence and with the Green Party averaging 13.5 per cent across the London borough elections in 2006, he is confident of returning to the chamber. Mr Lynch told ATG that as a member of the London Assembly he would do all he could to support small shops including art and antiques traders. He described the threats to the London's antiques areas from chains and high-street fashion outlets as a scandal. "Every bit of individuality in our city is being hammered away," he said. "If we don't do something now London will become a clone town." He also pointed out that the antiques trade could make more of its green credentials as it has been a cornerstone of the recycling industry for centuries. When not on the campaign trail, Noel Lynch conducts sales for Hornsey Auctions and other salerooms on a freelance basis. He also runs a collectors' charity shop in Archway Road called The Green Room, which he opened in 2005. Although primarily offering books and records, the curiosities currently on offer include a Victorian haemorrhoid removal device. Time Out described it as the "most unusual shop in London". Having originally trained as an auctioneer in his native Ireland, Mr Lynch has lived in Britain for 21 years and been a member of the Green Party for 19 years. He spent 12 years running The Bargain Centre in East Finchley, where he was a founder member of the East Finchley Traders Association. "Small businesses are essential to a thriving local community," he said. "They are the glue of a community. It has even been shown that where there are many small businesses, there is less crime

Camels bought at auction - for weed control

There was one definite conclusion from the first-ever camel auction held in Charters Towers, North Queensland, on the weekend - they weren’t as dear as chemical weed killers.

With camels having proven their ability to assist in weed control, several graziers took the opportunity on Saturday to invest in something other than chemicals to reduce woody weed numbers.

A total of 73 camels were sold under the hammer at the Dalrymple Stadium, while others sold after the auction.

Top price for a single camel was for a cow, at $650.

Cows averaged $350 and a cow with calf sold for $800.

Top price bull camel went for $500, with bull camels averaging $246.

The top priced bullock also sold for $500, with an average of $420, and the top yearling bull made $200, with an average of $200.

In all, the total sale grossed $26,500 for the 81 camels sold, with an average of $328.

Vendors for the sale were WH Carter and Co, and J and M Wharton.

The sale was conducted by Geaney's, Charters Towers.

Auctioneer Jim Geaney said he was pleased with the result from the auction and that the prices had met the market.

SOURCE: North Queensland Register, April 10

Auction opportunity: a worm to be named after you!

Here’s a new way to have your named something named a species named after you without you having discovered it. You pay for it. You could get a new species of nudibranch, which is a pleasantly plump hermaphrodite mollusk with bright orange speckles named after you for $15,000. Doesn’t take your fancy? Oh come on! Be adventurous! And how is all of this coming to be? Well, UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla is offering the chance to name about a dozen newly discovered species for a tax-deductible donation. Bids start at $5,000.

The money will benefit the Scripps Oceanographic Collections, a massive repository of ocean life and rock samples collected over the past 100 years. Curators have been scrambling to keep the collections afloat since losing state funding six years ago. The collections are used by students and researchers here and around the world.

And these guys aren’t the only ones in this “naming” business. Last year, Monaco's Oceanographic Museum sold the naming rights to a new shark species at a Christie's auction. Two years earlier, the online Golden Gate Casino gambling site paid the Wildlife Conservation Society to name a new species of Bolivian monkey. So what you waiting for? Get your own mollusk named after you. Or even better, your own hydrothermal vent worm for $50,000. I’m sure after you’ve paid up and named the worm after you, you’ll start seeing the resemblance!

Auction of Guru’s relic.

As expected, the proposed auction of a rare piece of body armour that experts believe belonged to Guru Gobind Singh in Sotheby's Arts of the Islamic World Sale has triggered condemnation from the Sikh community.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), the highest temporal body of Sikhs, has urged the countrymen to oppose the auction of the relic of "the Guru who had stood like a rock in the face of attack by foreign invaders".

It has also exhorted the Sikh Diaspora to purchase the relic "since it carries the name of Guru Gobind Singh" and has asked the prime minister to intervene and stop the auction as it would amount to the violation of maryada .

It goes under the hammer on April 9^th.

*Meeting with the Irish Environment Minister.

With our London Mayor candidate, Sian Berry and Irish Green Party leader, John Gormley, Environment minister in the Irish Government.

Nuclear power plant for auction.

Bulgaria will auction its Bobov Dol thermal power plant in three months, after two previous failed attempts to sell the outdated generator to a strategic investor, the privatization agency has announced.

Opening bid for the 420-megawatt, coal-fired plant in western Bulgaria is set at 100 million levs ($79.74 million).

SPACE SUIT FOR AUCTION TODAY.

The space suit patches from Buzz Aldrin's Gemini 12 space suit, presented by the astronaut to his parents as a Christmas gift in 1966, are estimated to sell for as much as $75,000 at a public auction today.

Aldrin's patches — given to his parents "with a grateful son's love," according to the inscription — are among the more expensive items available Tuesday at the Heritage Auction Galleries sale of air and space artifacts.

The priciest item looks like a dustpan with a foot-long aluminum handle. It's actually a scoop used by astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to pick up moon dust on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission. Its estimated worth: as much as $300,000.

Other items being auctioned include an American flag that went to the moon's surface on the Apollo 14 mission, a pair of needle-nose pliers from Apollo 16 and a lunar chart used during Apollo 17.

"When one considers ... just how few actual objects have been off-planet, it's amazing to think that any of us would have the opportunity to actually own one of these incredibly rare pieces," said Tom Slater, director of Americana auctions for Heritage.

Slater said the space memorabilia have "impeccable provenance." More than 100 lots in the auction come directly from astronauts such as Aldrin, Charles Duke and Richard Gordon.

Oddjob’s hat from Goldfinger makes $134,200 at auction.

The gun that shot Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe's purse, were among items at an auction last week.

The man behind a 41,000-acre "green, eco-sustainable community" in south Osceola County decided to do a little housecleaning this weekend - by unloading the Wicked Witch's hat from The Wizard of Oz, the whip that Harrison Ford used as Indiana Jones and the gun that Jack Ruby used to shoot Harvey Oswald.

Those pieces, along with more than 800 other relics of 20th-century history, went on the auction block in Las Vegas on Saturday because their owner, eccentric South Florida developer Anthony Pugliese, decided to unload much of his pop-culture collection and focus on his new community.

More than 50 bidders gathered at the Palms Casino to bid on about 450 pieces of movie-related memorabilia, while most of the approximately 200 bidders joined the auction by telephone or on the Internet.

Though the crowd was small, the prices were high. Bidders drove up the price of the Wicked Witch's hat to $197,400. The holy grail that Ford sought in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sold for $42,700, and bidders ran the price on Indiana Jones' bullwhip up to $70,150. Remember Odd Job from the James Bond movie Goldfinger? His famous bowler hat that could slice a statue in half sold for $134,200, said Arlan Ettinger of Guernsey's Auction House, the firm handling the auction.

The Jack Ruby gun failed to sell.

Titanic watch for sale on EBay auction.

A pocket watch found on the body of the last victim of the Titanic to be recovered has been put up for sale.

The item, which belonged to Dumfries-born steward Thomas Mullin, hopes to attract bidders on the internet auction website eBay.

The 20-year-old, who later moved to Southampton, was one of more than 1,500 victims of the 1912 disaster.

A crew badge belonging to Mr Mullin was sold at auction for £28,000 nearly four years ago.

The watch has a white face but has lost both its hands and is damaged beyond repair.

It comes with a certificate of authenticity and documents detailing Mr Mullin's childhood, family life and employment history.

It is being sold on internet auction site eBay by collector Paul Thorpe, from East Grinstead, West Sussex who bought it from another collector a couple of years ago.

The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on 15 April 1912, as it traveled from Southampton to New York.

Mr Mullin, of Onslow Road in Southampton, was one of more than 1,500 people who died in the tragedy.

On 20 April 1912 reports in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard newspaper confirmed that Mr Mullin's body had not yet been found.

Two days later, the cable ship Minia was commissioned by White Star Line to search for bodies.

Poor weather conditions hampered the search but the crew of the ship managed to recover 17 bodies, of which Mr Mullin was the last.

He was buried at Fairview Lawn Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia on 10 May 1912.

A memorial stone still stands in Dumfries dedicated to Mr Mullin and band member John Law Hume - the only two natives of the area who died on the Titanic.

Following his death, the watch was recovered and returned to Mr Mullin's family along with his steward's badge and a leather memo pad.

However, fearing that the artefacts brought bad luck, relatives sold them for just £102.

The badge alone later changed hands for a £28,000.