Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said she presented US President Donald Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize medal during their meeting today at the White House. Machado did not respond to reporters’ questions about whether he accepted.
But between political desire and institutional reality there is the Nobel Institute, which has already dampened the enthusiasm: once announced, the prize “is definitive and cannot be revoked, shared or transferred”. There are no constraints on what a Nobel does with the physical medal or the monetary prize. Machado can therefore give the medal, even if he cannot “transfer” or “share” the title.
And the story is not short of surprising episodes. There are those who sold the medal, like the American biologist James Watson, one of the fathers of the discovery of the structure of DNA. In 2014 he put his up for auction. It was bought by the Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov, who paid 4.1 million dollars and then returned the medal to him, claiming that a scientist of his caliber should not be left without it. There are those who sold it for charity, like the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021: his medal was sold for a record sum of 103.5 million dollars intended for Ukrainian children displaced by the war.
And there are those who saw the medal disappear. At least eight Nobel Prizes have been stolen in recent decades.
The most recent episode dates back to 2022, when former South African president FW de Klerk’s medal was stolen from his home safe. Even Ernest Hemingway had it stolen; his 1954 medal donated to the Catholic Church in Cuba disappeared and was only recovered years later.
The medal of the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, was confiscated by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal, along with personal effects. Only the intervention of the international community and the Nobel Institute convinced Tehran to return it.
During the Second World War, the medals of German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck risked falling into the hands of the Nazis. To save them, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia. The orange liquid remained in a beaker on a shelf in the laboratory, unnoticed by the SS who searched every corner for valuable possessions. Once the war was over, de Hevesy recovered the gold and the Nobel Foundation melted down the medals, returning them to their rightful owners.