[MSN] Police recover stolen Nobel prize and arrest student

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Police recover stolen Nobel prize and arrest student

By MICHELLE LOCKE Associated Press Writer
News Fuze
Article Launched:03/07/2007 03:05:43 PM PST
BERKELEY, Calif.- University of California, Berkeley, officials are celebrating the return of a purloined Nobel Prize medal.

Campus police said Wednesday they got a tip that led them to a UC Berkeley student who worked in the building where the medal was stolen last week from a locked case. Police said the student told them he took the prize on a whim.

"We are so relieved that it's back. It's so much a part of our heritage," said Linda Schneider of the Lawrence Hall of Science, a hands-on science museum in the hills above campus where the medal had been on display.

The prize was awarded to the late physicist Ernest O. Lawrence in 1939 for invention of the cyclotron—the atom smasher that paved the way for developments in the field of nuclear science and medicine—and was the first ever won by the university.

The loss of the medal was discovered last week.

After getting a tip, police interviewed biology senior Ian Michael Sanchez, 22, who worked at the museum.

UC police Lt. Doug Wing said Sanchez told police he used a key to take the medal during regular visiting hours at the museum. A few days after the theft, Sanchez showed the medal to friends, one of whom contacted authorities, police said.

Sanchez was arrested Wednesday and booked into jail on suspicion of felony grand theft.

Schneider said she was disappointed to hear that the suspect was a student employee but noted that the museum has hired hundreds of students over the years who are "integral to the running of the hall."

Campus police returned the medal to museum officials in a brief ceremony Wednesday. Museum officials planned to keep the medal under wraps until it is put in a more secure setting as part of the facility's 40th anniversary next May.

Lawrence died in 1958. After his wife died in 2003, the family donated the medal to the hall of science created as a memorial to his work.

The 23-karat medal is valued at $4,200, although officials said its intrinsic worth is immeasurable.

This was not the first time a Nobel had been nabbed.

In January, Utah police recovered a 1985 Nobel Peace Prize medal when they opened the car trunk of a man wanted in connection with a series of crimes. The medal was stolen last year. And in 2004, a Nobel Prize citation for the 1913 literature prize was stolen from an Indian university. That award was replaced with replicas.

News of the Berkeley theft drew reaction from across the country and beyond, Schneider said.

"One aspect of it that's been amazing and heartening to me is the reverence for the medal and for science," she said. 

http://www.mercurynews.com/