Experimental physicist Leon Lederman is planning to auction off his Nobel Prize gold medal with a reserve price of 325,000 dollars.
The 92-year-old retired physicist, who had won the honour in 1988 for discovering a sub-atomic particle called the Muon Neutrino, said the medal had been shelved for 20 years, and selling it seemed logical, the Guardian reports.
Nate D Sanders Auctions is conducting the online auction which will close on Thursday evening when the final bid has stood unchallenged for 30-minutes.
Earlier this year, the auction house sold two other Nobel prize medals, the Nobel Prize for Economics won by Simon Kuznets in 1971 and the Nobel Prize for Chemistry won by Heinrich Wieland in 1927. Both medals were put up for sale by descendants and were bought for almost 400,000 dollars.
Auction manager Laura Yntema said Lederman's medal was only the second to be auctioned, while the winner was still alive, and it would be an honour to own it.
Lederman's wife, Ellen, added that while they had enjoyed having the "wonderful" medal, it was really sitting useless in their log cabin.
