Physicist’s Nobel Prize sells for $765,000 in online auction
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A 1988 Nobel Prize put up for auction by a retired experimental physicist has sold for $765,002.
The online auction went into overtime Thursday evening until a final bid went unchallenged for half an hour. Nate D. Sanders Auctions spokesman Sam Heller says the final amount is the fourth-highest ever paid among the 10 Nobel Prizes that have been sold at auction.
The Los Angeles company declined to identify the buyer.
Leon Lederman won the Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists for discovering a subatomic particle called the muon neutrino.
He retired from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, in June 2012 and moved to Idaho.
The 92-year-old has said he decided to sell the prize because it has just been sitting on a shelf.