Former Batavia Resident, Fermilab Director Auctioning Off Nobel Prize

Photo credit: Nobel Prize website

Former Batavia resident and Noble Prize winner Leon Lederman has decided to auction off his prestigious medal that has sat on shelves at his homes, mostly unnoticed, for several decades, according to media reports.

The starting bid for the medal, which Lederman won in 1988, is $325,000. So far, no bids have been listed on the online auction, which is run by Nate D. Sanders Auction and will remain upon through Thursday.

It’s one of only 10 Nobel Prize medals to be auctioned off. Lederman won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery, along with two other colleagues, of the muon neutrino, a particle 200 times the size of an electron, according to Nate D. Sanders Auction.

Lederman, who retired from Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia in 2012, moved with his wife, Ellen, to their log cabin in Driggs, Idaho, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. There, much like it did in their home in Batavia for two decades, the medal sat on a shelf, Ellen Lederamn told the Sun-Times.

“We could have used the medal as a coaster,” Ellen Lederman jokingly said in the Sun-Times article. “It’s beautiful and it’s extremely important, but you either put it on the shelf or in a safe deposit box. We put it on a shelf and it has never really been on our minds or something we worried about.”

Laura Yntema, auction manager for Nate D. Sanders Auctions, told the Chicago Tribune that people who buy Nobel Prize medals are similar to the type of people who buy sports memorabilia.

“It would just be an honor to own it,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “What these people have accomplished, it’s mindboggling how they advanced society.”

Lederman’s Nobel Prize is made of 18 karat gold and is plated in 24 karats of gold, according to the Nate D. Sanders Auction website.

“The thing that was wonderful for Leon about the prize was that he was able to have a better soap box to get the attention of people who didn’t understand the things about science and help get funding,” Ellen Lederman told the Chicago Sun-Times.

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