Nobel Prize for medicine kicks off awards week

This year's Nobel Prize season begins on Monday with the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm will announce the winner at 11:30 am (0930 GMT) at the earliest.

The award can go to a single winner or to two or three at the same time who, for example, have researched the same topic.

Last year, the institute awarded the prize to Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó and US immunologist Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.

The year before, Leipzig-based Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist, was honoured for his groundbreaking work on human evolution.

Each day this week the prizes in the other categories will be announced: in physics, in chemistry, in literature, followed by the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics prize on Monday.

The prizes themselves will be handed over on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel (1833-96), inventor of dynamite and benefactor of the prizes.

This year, the awards are endowed with 11 million Swedish krona (just over $1 million dollars) per category.