How Nobel Winners Spend Their Prize Money

The honor and prestige of winning a Nobel may be priceless, but nobody would pursue prestige if it didn't pay. The Nobel Prize's 2009 cash value: a cool $1.4 million. Inside, a look at what laureates have done with the purse. — By Richard Friebe

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When Austrian Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, a television reporter asked what the prize meant to her. Jelinek paused, apparently amused at the foolishness of the question, then replied: financial independence, of course.

The typical Nobel Prize winner is no slouch — he or she has probably already got a good job at a prestigious university — but while winners make an honest dollar, wealthy they are not. Most laureates spend their prize money (about $1.4 million) in mundane ways: to pay the mortgage, buy a car or save for rainier days. MIT's Wolfgang Ketterle, one of three scientists to win the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics 2001, said, "I used the Nobel money to buy a house and for the education of my children." Others, meanwhile, such as the late Franco Modigliani, an MIT professor who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1985, buy a sailboat.

In the following pages: how a smattering of other Nobel laureates spent their winnings. — By Richard Friebe

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