The University of California, Berkeley, confirmed via its website that it would auction two Nobel-Prize winning inventions as NFTs. The NFTs will incorporate internal forms and correspondence regarding the research done for two innovative biomedical advances.
The first NFT bears the name “The Fourth Pillar” and has been minted on Foundation. It will be listed for auction on June 2nd, an event that will last 24 hours. The NFT includes an invention regarding cancer immunotherapy, which was created by Jim Allison of UC Berkeley. This invention won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2018. The name was inspired by the fact that immunotherapy became the “fourth pillar” of cancer therapy, following surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
The second NFT hasn’t been minted yet, but it was confirmed that it would honor Jennifer Doudna who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This research was done around the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The patents for the research will continue to remain with the university.
The proceeds from the auction will be directed towards research and education with a percentage actually going to UC Berkeley’s blockchain innovation hub and student group known as “Blockchain at Berkeley.”
Rich Lyons, the chief innovation & entrepreneurship officer of the university, declared the release to be “something magnificent” and said “there are people who recognize and care about symbols of great science, and even if they never intend to resell the NFT, they want to own it and they want resources to go back to Berkeley, where the basic research behind these Nobel Prizes came from, to support further research.”
A portion of the proceeds will also go to carbon offsets in order to tackle the issue of the energy cost of minting the NFTs.