WINNERS NAMED EARLY IN SLIP-UP

Nobel committee says how mishap occurred is unknown

The most prestigious and secretive prize in science ran headfirst into the digital era Wednesday when Swedish media got an emailed news release revealing the winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the news prematurely went public.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it was investigating.

About four hours before the official announcement was planned Wednesday, several Swedish media received a news release from the academy revealing that U.S.-based scientists Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov had won the 2023 chemistry prize for their work on quantum dots.

“We don’t know what happened,” the academy’s secretary-general, Hans Ellengren, said.

The five-member Nobel Prize committees spend months whittling down lists of nominations before the full academy makes its official decision on the day of the award, announcing Nobel winners at a scheduled news conference.

Wednesday’s premature news release reinforced suspicions that the final decision is just a formality, since material including background information on the winners must be prepared in advance.

More important, it showed the difficulty of keeping anything secret for long in the age when virtually everything is online.

“It is an important principle that the prize winners are the first to find out, and that everyone else finds out afterward at the same time,” the former head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Göran Hansson, told news agency TT. “But in the electronic era the leaks can occur in different ways than in the newspaper era.”