LOS ANGELES, CA.- One of just eight Nobel Prizes to have ever been sold comes to the market with Julien’s Auctions on November 17 in Hollywood, California.

This Alfred Nobel Prize was awarded in 1956 to British scientist, Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his work in Chemistry. The medal is estimated to sell for $200,000 to $400,000. His work in explosives and chain reactions led to the development of antibiotics and other therapeutic agents.

The medal is solid 23 carat gold and weighs 202 grams. On one side it bears the profile of Alfred Nobel and on the other side the goddess Nature bearing a cornucopia with the Genius of Science holding up her veil. Below it is a plaque engraved with the winners name, C.N. Hinshelwood. The medal is housed in a custom-made red leather box stamped with the winner’s name in gold.

Born in London Cyril Hinshelwood was knighted in 1948 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1960. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 jointly with Nikolay Semenov of the USSR for their researches into the mechanism of chemical reactions, specifically the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen.

Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions says:”We are honoured and delighted to be able to offer this historic medal which commemorates some outstanding scientific work by one of the greatest minds in his field of chemistry. It highlights how one avenue of science – explosives – can lead to advances in another, medicine.”

Hinshelwood was educated first in Canada, returning in 1905 on the death of his father to a small flat in Chelsea where he lived for the rest of his life. He studied at Westminster City School and then Balliol College, Oxford.

During WW1 Hinshelwood worked as a chemist in an explosives factory. After the war he tutored at Trinity College Oxford from 1921 to 1937. He served on several Advisory Councils on scientific matters to the British Government.

His early studies led to the publication of Thermodynamics for Students of Chemistry and The Kinetics of Chemical Change in 1926. He studied the explosive reaction of hydrogen and oxygen and described the phenomenon of chain reaction. His subsequent work on chemical changes in the bacterial cell proved to be of great importance in later research work on antibiotics and therapeutic agents, and his book, The Chemical Kinetics of the Bacterial Cell was published in 1946, followed by Growth, Function and Regulation in Bacterial Cells in 1966. In 1951 he published The Structure of Physical Chemistry.

Hinshelwood never married. He was fluent in seven classical and modern languages and his main hobbies were painting, collecting Chinese pottery, and foreign literature. He died, at home, on 9 October 1967. After he died, his Nobel Prize medal was evidently sold by his estate, and in 1976 purchased by a coin dealer in Los Angeles for $15,000.