Nobel Prizes are traditionally highly coveted and prestigious awards, cherished by recipients and carrying global fame and a hefty financial reward for winners, selected for their outstanding works and contributions.  Arguably the most famous of the prizes set out by Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel in his will in 1895, is the Peace Prize, which includes an 18-carat gold medal and an award of more than $1 million for an individual or organisation most contributing to “fraternity between nations”.  On Thursday, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gifted hers to President Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House.  Here’s what to know about whether a Nobel Prize can be regifted.  Why did Machado give her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump?  Machado, an opposition leader who spent almost a year in hiding before escaping Venezuela late last year, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, with the Nobel Committee describing her as “a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness”. While Machado dedicated the prize to the “suffering people of Venezuela” and Trump “for his decisive support of our cause,” the White House accused the committee of placing “politics over peace” in its decision.  But since the US mission to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in early January, Machado appears to have been sidelined by the Trump administration, which publicly backed Maduro’s vice-president and questioned Machado’s ability to lead Venezuela.  In an interview with Fox News last week, Machado praised Trump and said she and the Venezuelan people wanted to “share” the prize with him, in an apparent bid to gain favour with the United States.  Trump, who had publicly coveted the prize and claimed to have “solved” a number of international conflicts, accepted the award on Thursday, describing the move as a “wonderful gesture of mutual respect”.  What has the Nobel Committee said about it?  Nobel’s prizes reward outstanding efforts in the fields that he was most involved in during his lifetime: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, with the first prize awarded in 1901. The prize for economic sciences was added in 1969.  The position of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Norwegian Nobel Institute has been clear.  “Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” they said in a statement last week. “The decision is final and stands for all time.”  “A medal can change owners, but the title of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate cannot,” the Nobel Peace Center wrote on social media Thursday.  Can you sell a Nobel Prize?  The Nobel Peace Prize medals bear the portrait of Alfred Nobel and are engraved with the name of the laureate and the phrase: “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium,” which translated means, “For the peace and brotherhood of men”.  Until 1980 they were made of 23-carat gold, weighing approximately 200g. Since then, they have been made of 18-carat recycled gold and mostly weigh about 175g, according to the Nobel Committee.  There have been a handful of occasions where a Nobel Prize medal has been sold.  In 2019, the estate of the late mathematician John F. Nash, jnr – made famous in the 2021 Russell Crowe movie “A Beautiful Mind” – auctioned his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal, received in 1994 for his contributions to Game Theory, for $735,000, according to auction house Christie’s.  British scientist James Watson, part of a team who helped discover the structure of DNA, auctioned off his 1962 Nobel Prize Medal in Medicine or Physiology in 2014, fetching $4,757,000. He also auctioned a handwritten Nobel Prize “Banquet” speech for $365,000.  More recently, in 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov sold his Nobel Peace Prize medal for $103.5 million to an anonymous buyer at an auction event in New...