The Nobel Prize is a big deal, and its winner is an even bigger one. It takes one great person from a pool of around 3,000 extraordinary individuals who have made a difference to the world. That makes the prize sought after not just by people earning it but also later in the auction market, too. Reuters clarified that the Nobel Peace Prize remains inseparably linked to the person or organization that won it, even though the medal itself can be given away. And people have given their medals away.
Sounds like a tough decision, right? But it may not be, especially when one can get over $100 million for it. Yes, it is a lifetime’s work; if one can get a monetary benefit for it, then why not? More so, it does not take the title away, just the physical representation. The most expensive Nobel Prize medal ever sold was Dmitry Muratov’s 2021 Nobel Peace Prize medal, which went for $103.5 million at Heritage Auctions in New York on June 20, 2022. Muratov, the Russian journalist and editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, won the prize for defending press freedom and dedicated it to the newspaper’s journalists who lost their lives for their work.The high price also won the medal a Guinness-certified record for any Nobel medal sold at auction.
The timing made the sale even more powerful. The auction was held on World Refugee Day, so the act of selling a peace medal in New York was directly tied to the fate of millions of displaced people across Europe. The atmosphere in the room was electric as bidding opened around $787,500 and reached $3 million in no time. From a very unexpected $16 million, a single anonymous phone bidder ended the auction by going straight for the kill and jumping directly to $103.5 million in less than 30 minutes. What is even more insane is that it broke the previous record by nearly $100 million, a roughly twenty-fold jump, as the earlier all-time high was about $4.76 million for James Watson’s DNA Nobel medal.
The American molecular biologist co-discovered the double-helix structure of DNA and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it in 1962. In a very moving gesture, Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov, who was the buyer of Watson’s Nobel medal, returned it to him and still donated the purchase price to scientific causes. The best takeaway from Muratov’s auction was that the entire amount was donated to UNICEF for children displaced by the war in Ukraine. Not every Nobel Prize winner parts with their medal for a pure financial windfall. Sometimes this medal acts as a flotation device that helps them navigate their financial hurdles. That was the case with American physicist Leon Lederman, co-winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the muon neutrino and famous for popularizing the nickname “God particle.” He sold his medal in 2015 to help cover his medical bills, as he lived with dementia and received 765,000 dollars for it.
The amount garnered by Dmitry Muratov’s 2021 Nobel Peace Prize medal is truly as life-changing as his work. The medal in itself is special, designed by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland in 1901, and the only medal he ever designed. It features a portrait of Alfred Nobel and the words “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium,” meaning “For the peace and brotherhood of men.” It is made of 18-carat “green” gold (an alloy of gold and silver) with a 24-carat gold plating. If the medal were melted straight down, it would only earn the owner around 10,000 dollars, but it is the humanitarian value that catapulted it to nine figures.
