Stockholm:
Swedish media published the apparently leaked names of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners on Wednesday, hours before the laureates were to be announced.
Nobel Prize leaks are rare, with the various awards academies doing their utmost to keep the names of the winners secret until the announcements.
The Swedish reference article Dagens Nyheter and the public broadcasters Swedish Television and Swedish Radio reported receiving a press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences naming three US-based chemists.
“We cannot comment on this until we know what happened, we need to investigate,” Academy press spokeswoman Eva Nevelius told AFP.
According to the Swedish reports, the laureates are Moungi Bawendi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Louis Brus of Columbia University and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology.
They had won the prize “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”, the reports said.
The press release was not on the Academy’s web page.
The Academy was due to make its announcement at 11.45am (0945 GMT), minutes after holding a meeting and a vote to choose the winner.
Heiner Linke, an expert on the Academy’s Nobel Committee for Chemistry, expressed his surprise to Dagens Nyheter.
“Right now I’m just trying to understand what happened. We haven’t made a decision yet, so if a press release went out, it’s definitely a mistake,” Linke said.
The list of nominations for each award is also kept secret for 50 years.
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