Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Scandal in Stockholm.


Just hours after the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work that delves into the complex chemical compounds that form the thousands of proteins that make up living matter, Stockholm was rocked this morning.

One of the trio of winning scientists, Venkatraman Ramakrishnanashanashan of the MDC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambrook, England, turns out to have "faked" her studies. "The studies weren't done with real ribosomes," said a Nobel spokesman who preferred anonymity. Venkatraman Ramakrishnanashanashan claimed that "a low level employee in the lab" falsified the study without the knowledge of senior people in the MDC labs and submitted it to the Nobel committee. Despite claiming no knowledge of the falsification, the submission to the Nobel committee was signed off by Venkatraman Ramakrishnanashanashan and other senior people in the lab.

A spokesman for Omnipublic, the holding company that owns the MDC Laboratory, promises an ongoing investigation.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I saw a follow-up report on this. Turns out the application was submitted via Twitter. The entire scientific community was so blown away by this landmark innovation they failed to even notice it was all bogus.