(JTA) — The 1988 Nobel Prize in physics won by Jewish-American experimental physicist Leon Lederman sold at auction for $765,002.
Lederman, 92, and his wife, Ellen, decided to sell the medal after he was diagnosed with dementia, The Associated Press reported.
The online bidding was conducted by the Los Angeles-based Nate D. Sanders Auctions. The results of the daylong auction on Thursday were reported over the weekend.
Ten Nobel Prizes have been sold at auction; only two were put up by a living winner.
Lederman won the Nobel Prize with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberge for their discovery of the muon neutrino, a subatomic particle. He also won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982 and the U.S. National Medal of Science. He is a member of the board of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.
Lederman is credited with coining the nickname the “God particle” for the Higgs Boson subatomic particle, a term he used in a 1993 book promoting support for the Superconducting Super Collider.
He used his share of the approximately $1 million prize to buy a vacation home in Idaho, where he now lives permanently, according to AP.
