Heena Sharma Blog

The announcement on Monday of the Nobel Medicine Prize opens this year's amputated awards season, with no Literature Prize for the first time in 70 years because of a # MeToo scandal . Like every year, Nobel aficionados have speculated wildly about possible winners, given the number of worthy candidates in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and economics. The medicine prize committee at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute is the first to reveal its choice of laureates, on Monday at 11:30 am (0930 GMT). But its announcement risks being at least partially eclipsed by a Stockholm court's verdict around the same time against Frenchman Jean-Claude Arnault, charged with rape. However, the discovery could be too early for a Nobel, with a recent study suggesting the technique may damage DNA more than previously thought. A legal dispute is also raging over who discovered the technique. It has been claimed on the one hand by the French-American r...

The Swedish Academy has been facing a crisis after reports emerged of 18 women claiming to have been raped, sexually assaulted or harassed by an Academy member’s husband International News  : The Swedish Academy said on Friday it would postpone this year’s Nobel Literature Prize for the first time in almost 70 years, as it is rocked by turmoil over links to a man accused of rape and sexual assault. “The Swedish Academy intends to decide on and announce the Nobel Prize in Literature   for 2018 in parallel with the naming of the 2019 laureate,” it said. The institution, founded in 1786, has on seven previous occasions chosen to reserve the prize: in 1915, 1919, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1936 and 1949. “On five of those occasions, the prize was delayed then awarded at the same time as the following year’s prize,” the Academy said in a statement. The body has been plunged in crisis since November, in the wake of the global #MeToo campaign, when Swedish newspaper of referen...