NBC News reports that former Fermilab Director Leon Lederman’s 1988 Nobel Prize medal netted $765,002 in a public auction and that, sadly, proceeds will help pay medical bills following a diagnosis of dementia for the Nobel-winning physicist.

According to the NBC report, referenced in the Monday edition of Fermilab Today, the winning bid was $633,335, and a buyer’s premium brought the final price to $765,002.

Lederman, 92, won a share of the physics prize for his role in the discovery of the muon neutrino.

The article said the $765,002 sale price is the fourth-highest amount paid for a Nobel Prize in an auction. No. 1 was James Watson’s 1962 gold medal, which went for $4.7 million. Watson played a key role in deciphering DNA’s double helix.

No. 2 was $2.2 million recorded in 2013 for the medal owned by the late British biologist Francis Crick, a colleague of Watson’s. No. 3 was $1.1 million for the Nobel Peace Prize medal won in 1936 by Carlos Saavedra Lamas, an Argentine scholar and statesman.

SOURCES: NBC News and Femilab Today