Ignoble Nobel medal theft sees prize recovered

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 08 March 2007 18:53

Science - Energy

A Nobel Prize awarded for the invention of the cyclotron has been recovered at last following its theft by a foolhardy student at the Berekely University of California.

The cyclotron is an atomic particle accelerator, and its invention gave Ernest Lawrence a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939. The award itself is a 200 gram, 23-karat gold medallion, and it was stored in a locked display cabinet in a building named after Lawrence, called the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California in Berkeley.

The award was allegedly stolen on February 28 by Ian Michael Sanchez, a 22 year old student who worked in the building, with the theft not discovered until March the 1st. The award is valued at US $4200, and a tip off from one of Sanchez’s friends to police, who had seen Sanchez showing off the medal, was the clincher in getting the medal back, and getting Sanchez into serious trouble.

He faces not only a charge of ‘felony grand theft’, but also could find himself on the receiving end of a warning, a suspension or even an expulsion from the University for his most foolhardy of alleged actions.

So far, the US $2500 reward for the recovery of Ernest Lawrence’s Nobel medal has not been awarded.

It is not the first time a Nobel medal has been stolen. In 1985, the Nobel medal awarded to Kay Miller for ‘International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’ was stolen and recovered, while in 2004 a Nobel Medal awarded to Indian Poet Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 was stolen. He was the fisrt non-westerner to win the Nobel Prize in literature.