This Wednesday, several Swedish media published the names of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners, hours before the announcement. The leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and public channels Swedish Television and Swedish Radio reported that they had received a press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences naming three American chemists.
“We cannot comment until we know what happened, we have to investigate,” Academy spokesperson Eva Nevelius told AFP.
According to the Swedish press, the winners are Moungi Bawendi, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis Brus, from Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov, from Nanocrystals Technology, who won the prize “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.” The statement was not on the website of the Swedish Academy, which was due to make the announcement around 10:45 a.m. in Lisbon.
Heiner Linke, an expert from the Academy’s Nobel Committee for Chemistry, expressed his surprise to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
“Now I’m just trying to understand what happened. We haven’t made a decision yet. So if a press release comes out, it will definitely be a mistake,” said Heiner Linke.
The list of nominations for each award is kept secret for 50 years.
Source: TSF
