Russian Journalist Sells Nobel Prize For Record $103.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov poses with his 23-carat medal before it is auctioned at the Times Center on June 20 in New York.

The Nobel Peace Prize that Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov won last year has been auctioned off for a record-shattering $103.5 million.

All of the proceeds from the sale, which concluded on June 20, will go to UNICEF's Humanitarian Response for Ukrainian Children Displaced by War, according to Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale.
The buyer was an unidentified phone bidder. The previous record for a Nobel Prize medal was $4.76 million, paid by a bidder in 2014 for the prize won in 1962 by James Watson, for the co-discovery of the structure of DNA. Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27 million for his medal. Muratov, who helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta, put his Nobel Prize medal up for auction to raise funds to help the millions of Ukrainians who have fled the country since Russia invaded on February 24. He already announced he was donating the $500,000 cash award for the Nobel Prize to charity. In an interview with AP, Muratov said he was particularly concerned about children who have been orphaned because of the conflict in Ukraine. “We want to return their future," he said. Muratov shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa, who co-founded Rappler, a news website critical of the Philippine government. Muratov was Novaya gazeta's editor in chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin's clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

With reporting by AP and AFP