Kalsang Rinchen
Dharamsala, December 19 – The prestige of the Nobel Prizes may be at stake if an investigation for possible bribery proves China’s influence on Nobel committees for medicine, physics and chemistry.
Swedish media reported that members of the Nobel jury went on free trips to China on the expense of the Chinese government. Swedish Radio said that the Chinese ministry of education paid for the trips and hotel bills of some members of the jury for Nobel Prize on two occasions, 2006 and 2008.
According to AFP, a special corruption prosecutor Nils Erik Schultz said Thursday that Nobel committees in Sweden are being investigated for possible bribery. The authorities are investigating into reasons for the committees visit to China and chances of their being influenced by China.
Schultz is finding out “why the Chinese wanted to invite these people to China, was there the possibility they thought they could influence them in any way.”
Schultz said he was looking into “the cost, who went on the trip, where they went, what position they held and I want to see their itinerary too.”
He said the investigation is not currently examining any people specifically, but looking into the trip itself to begin with.
Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which earlier this year signed a sponsor agreement with two Nobel companies with close ties to the Nobel Foundation: Nobel Web and Nobel Media, is also under the radar of investigation.
Half of this year’s Nobel Medicine Prize went to Harald zur Hausen of Germany for his discovery of the human papilloma virus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer. AstraZeneca receives royalties for the two available vaccines against HPV.
Schultz said he was gathering information on the case to determine whether the pharmaceutical company had any influence over the Medicine Prize committee’s choice of this year’s winners. However, he has not yet decided to formally launch a preliminary investigation.
Some say this could be an attempt by China to deliberately put the Nobel Prizes’ prestige into bad light as the Dalai Lama, whom China calls a ‘wolf in a monk’s robe’, is highly respected all over the world as a winner of the same prize for peace in 1989. China earlier protested after two of its own citizens, Hu Jia, winner of European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, and Gao Zhisheng, were looked at as a probable contenders for this year’s Nobel peace prize.
