From charities to motorcycles: How Nobel winners spend their windfall

On Tuesday, 80-year-old Francois Englert of Belgium and 84-year-old Peter Higgs of England won a Nobel Prize for their work surrounding the Higgs boson, otherwise known as the God Particle. Along with the recognition, prestige, and the Nobel medal itself, the two will receive $1.25 million.

If that sounds like a lot of money for a prize, that's because it is. (Pulitzer winners, by comparison, get just $10,000.) But the actual take-home is usually diminished — it's split among partners, or several scientists working toward the same goal, and another 50 percent or so goes to taxes.

So what do the winners do with what's left?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"I think it depends a lot on which country they come from, their personal finances...what kind of incomes they have when they get the prize, and where they are in life," Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, told Tom Sullivan at AFP.

Some donate the money to further the work that won them the prize. In 2008, when Al Gore won the Nobel Prize for his work in strengthening "the struggle against climate change," he promptly donated his winnings to the Alliance for Climate Protection, his own organization dedicated to drumming up grassroots support to fight global warming.

Others have used the money to establish new prizes. The neuroscientist Paul Greengard, whose research surrounding neuron communication led to the development of antidepressants, shared his money with two other researchers, then used his chunk to establish a new prize in his own name.

Yet others start a cause in a different field. Günter Blobel, the physiologist who won for breakthroughs in cellular research, donated the money to the city of Dresden, Germany, to help it rebuild religious buildings destroyed in World War II.

But not all laureates funnel their money altruistically. Some use the windfall to treat themselves for all those years — decades, really — of hard work.

Take Sir Paul Nurse, a geneticist and cell biologist who won in 2001 for helping to discover the protein molecules that control cell division, a key step for cancer research. He used his money to buy a really powerful motorcycle. In fact, the 64-year-old "still rides a Kawasaki 500 — and has a share of a plane which he flies when living at the family home which he has maintained in Oxfordshire," says The Guardian.

And Franco Modigliani, the MIT professor who won in 1985 for his work analyzing stock market values, used a chunk of his $225,000 share "to upgrade his laser-class sailboat," says MIT.

Richard Roberts, the winner of a 1993 Nobel for discovering introns (a nucleotide sequence within a gene removed by RNA splicing — obviously) has quieter tastes: He reportedly used the funds to install a croquet lawn in front of his house.

Then there's Phillip Allen Sharp. The geneticist and molecular biologist, who co-discovered RNA splicing, purchased a house that was "a little bit bigger," he told Sullivan.

So what will Higgs, 84, spend his new small fortune on? Tough to say. But whatever it is, he likely won't be buying it on the internet.