Thieves target Nobel prize w inner’s widow for his medal
THE widow of a Scottish Nobel Prize winner has been burgled twice by thieves she believes want to steal his £500,000 gold medal.
Rona Black nearly came face to face with the raiders but has now spoken out to avoid further break-ins.
She believes she disturbed them during the first burglary, which happened as she returned home from holiday.
The second occurred on Wednesday evening, minutes after she left home to visit a friend.
Newly-installed CCTV captured a man on the roof of her home in Dulwich, southeast London, and police are investigating.
Lady Black, 77, wants the criminals to know the Nobel and Order of Merit medals given to her late husband Sir James Black, who discovered beta-blockers, are not kept in the house.
The solid 18-carat gold Nobel medal weighs 6.17oz and is thought to be worth at least £500,000, while the Order of Merit medal is priceless because there are only 24 in existence.
Lanarkshire-born Sir James donated his Nobel medal to the National Museum of Scotland in 2009. The Order of Merit medal was returned to Buckingham Palace on his death in 2010 aged 89.
Lady Black, known professionally as the award-winning dermatologist Professor Rona MacKie, told the London Evening Standard: ‘The fact that they came back does make you worry what they are looking for, and to what extent they will go to get it.
‘I spent January turning my little house into Fort Knox. I thought I was safe but they got back in again, despite the CCTV and a better burglar alarm.
‘I don’t think I can do anything else to stop them. I would like the message to go out that there are no valuable medals in my possession at all.’
Dundee-born Lady Black was returning on December 29 from Christmas with her son in Australia when the first raid happened. ‘They had trashed the bedroom,’ she said. ‘I think I was probably the one who disturbed them. Behind one of the wardrobes was a small safe.
‘They had obviously spent a lot of time trying to drill it out. There was cement dust everywhere.’
Her bedroom door had been blocked shut from the inside and the windows of the glass door were carefully smashed to avoid setting off the burglar alarm.
Some of her own medals, her husband’s knighthood insignia and her grandmother’s wedding ring were stolen.
She installed a new motion-activated burglar alarm and CCTV but was burgled again on Wednesday evening.
The thieves pulled the alarm from a wall to disable it after smashing through her bedroom window. She added: ‘They seemed to be looking for more medals. They ignored a camera and a radio and other electrical items.
‘The CCTV shows a man on my roof at 7.33pm. You can see him fiddling with my security light. He seems to be talking to someone at the back of the garden that leads to the lane. This time round he has taken jewellery and a cache of medals in my husband’s study, mostly non-precious medals.
‘I just wonder if he is looking for a Nobel prize medal, though how anybody got to know this is the home of the late Sir James Black, I don’t know.’ Sir James, a physician and pharmacologist, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for discovering the beta-blocker, propranolol, which relaxes blood vessels and lowers blood pressure by moderating how hard the heart beats.
He also played a key role in the anti-ulcer drug cimetidine.
The Order of Merit is the personal gift of the monarch and is restricted to 24 living recipients, meaning a medal must be returned when its owner dies.
Current recipients include Sir David Attenborough and internet founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
The Nobel medal of James Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA, was sold for £2.6million in 2014.
‘They trashed the bedroom’