Nobel jurors under probe for favouritism

The sanctity of the decision to award the prestigious Nobel prize was questioned when Swedish prosecutors launched an investigation to find out whether China tried to influence three jury members of the Swedish Nobel Committee, who were provided an all-expenses paid trips to China by the Chinese government.

The prosecutors are also investigating the award of the Nobel Prize for medicine, to Harald zur Hausen, which could have been influenced by a jury member who was also on the board of a pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which is said to have benefited from the award.

Last week as five Europeans, four Americans and three Japanese received the $1.2 million Nobel prizes to mark the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death in 1896, questions were raised in the Swedish media as to whether the sanctity of the award was breached when three members of the Nobel Committees for natural science, medicine, physics, and chemistry went on the Chinese government-sponsored trip to China to lecture on the selection process and what it takes to win a Nobel Prize.

The jury members made two separate trips with two jurors visiting China in March 2006 and three in January 2008, where the Chinese government paid for the flight, hotel and food expenses.

Public prosecutor, Nils-Erik Schultz has decided to launch an investigation to find out whether the Chinese government's all-expenses paid trips to China by the Nobel Selection Committee jurors was made to influence them, wherein they could face bribery charges leading to fines and a prison term of two years.

''As of now, the investigation does not focus on any particular person, but at a set of procedures. In the first instance we need to focus on a few trip to China,'' Schultz is reported to have told Sveriges Radio.

A spokesperson for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel prize for chemistry, physics and economics, said that the trips was uncalled for and inappropriate as the jurors should have been more careful by not letting the Nobel committee's integrity be questioned.

One commentator said that, China with its new found wealth was trying to buy a Nobel prize, which it last received in1957, when two Chinese researchers won the award in physics.

The jury members who are being probed, said that on hindsight, maybe the trip was wrong but denied all allegations of bribery or influence.

Separately, prosecutors in Sweden are also investigating whether the London-based multinational pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca, was in any way involved in influencing the Nobel award given in medicine to Harald zur Hausen this year, as a member of the jury was also a board member of AstraZeneca, who seems to have benefited from the award.

AstraZeneca has a stake in two lucrative vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer and Harald zur Hausen was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his discovery of the same virus.

According to media reports, Bo Angelin, a board member of AstraZeneca is also on the 50 member board that elects winners for the Nobel Prize and Bertil Fredholm, the chairman of the five member team that assesses Nobel candidates, was a paid consultant for the pharma company in 2006.

Bertil Fredholm, has however lashed out at false media reports and said that he was not a paid consultant for AstraZeneca. However, he did say that the company paid him $1,400 in 2006 for work he conducted in his lab on cell-surface proteins.

These proteins known as receptors is something that Fredholm specialises in and out of the $1,400 he received from AstraZeneca, 25 per cent was deducted as taxes, 36 per cent was given to Karolinska Institute in Stockholm as overheads, and the rest was given to his lab's research budget.

Of late, AstraZeneca has been sponsoring the Nobel website, Nobel Media and Nobel Web and the contracts, which are for three years are reported to run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Denying any attempt to influence the Nobel Prize selection, AstraZeneca told the Toronto Star, that the company was not in a position to influence nor would it ever try to seek doing it, while the Nobel foundation also denied any wrongdoing saying there is a separation between sponsoring and selection of Nobel candidates.