Drug Firm May Have Bribed Nobel Prize Board

Friday, December 12, 2008 7:18 PM
By: Celia Farber

The Nobel Prize Committee is facing criminal investigation of bribery and corruption after allegedly taking huge payments from a pharmaceutical company that directly benefits from the work of this year's Nobel Prize winner in medicine.

The astonishing scandal, being reported in the European trade press and conspicuously absent from Sweden's major daily newspapers, surfaced just days before the internationally renowned awards were presented in Stockholm on Wednesday.

According to Swedish trade journal Dagens Medicin, two Nobel-affiliated corporations -- Nobel Media and Nobel Webb -- are accused of taking "many millions" of dollars from Swedish-American pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca.

Astra Zeneca, which makes market-leading Human Papilloma Virus vaccines Cervarix and Gardisil, stands to benefit greatly from the 2008 Nobel Prize given to German Harald zur Hauser for his discovery of HPV and its link to cervical cancer.

The trade journal reported Friday that the Nobel Committee's financial connections with Astra Zeneca "may be criminal."

Swedish state Prosecutor Christer van der Kwast told Dagens Medicin that he had ordered a full criminal investigation, on the eve of Wednesday’s lavish award ceremonies, adding dryly: "It was not my intention to ruin the party."

Swedish state radio Sveriges Radio reported more conflicts of interest this week, involving at least two Nobel Committee academics: Professor of metabolic research Bo Angelin, from the Karolinska Institute, is both on the board of Astra Zeneca, and a voting member of the Nobel Committee. Another highly placed academic in the Nobel Committee, Bertil Fredholm, was revealed to have been a paid consultant for Astra Zeneca through 2006.

"When these kinds of revelations come to light, of course it becomes our highest priority to investigate," van der Kvast said. "The criminal charges that may become formalized are bribery and corruption."

Meanwhile, controversy also centered on the other half of the Nobel prize in Medicine, given to Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, for his claims of the 1983 discovery of what was termed the “AIDS virus.â€