Photo by ereneta via Flickr

They say it's Sweden's silly season, a time when journalists are desperately seeking a new spin on a century-old story: the Nobel Prizes.

Last week, as luminaries gathered for Nobel Week in Stockholm, Radio Sweden reported a potential scandal surrounding the Physiology or Medicine prize. Allegations were swirling, the state-owned station said, that London-based drug manufacturer AstraZeneca, PLC, had, in essence, paid off members of the Nobel voting committee to help secure a win for Harald zur Hausen for his discovery that the human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer. (HIV can increase the risk of HPV-related diseases, and zur Hausen shared the Nobel with two scientists who discovered HIV.)

The purported reason: AstraZeneca has a stake in an anti-HPV vaccine and so stood to make a bundle if the guy who discovered a use for it snagged the coveted prize and, with it, press coverage.

The alleged scandal was the talk of the Nobels and soon became fodder for a cadre of contrarians who, despite scads of hard scientific evidence, have insisted for years that HIV does not cause AIDS. Among them was journalist Celia Farber, who repeated the  Nobel bribery rumor on the West Palm Beach, Fla.–based news site, Newsmax.com.

The allegations picked up steam when Swedish prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, told the journal Dagens Medicin that he was probing whether there were any grounds for criminal charges. In a phone interview, van der Kwast told ScientificAmerican.com that he was conducting a "preliminary investigation," but officials from the Nobel Foundation and AstraZeneca said his office had not contacted them yet.

Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, chalked up the probe to an opportunity for the prosecutor to grab the spotlight. "How should I put it in diplomatic terms? [Van der Kwast] often appears in the media," Sohlman said. To wit: a recent Swedish television documentary took the prosecutor to task after a serial killer retracted his confession and  appealed his conviction; some reports allege that van der Kwast had concealed evidence to win the case.

As for the Nobels, as scurrilous as the charges may sound, there is little evidence to support them. First off, AstraZeneca's ties to the anti-HPV vaccine are tenuous at best: In 2007 it purchased a company called MedImmune, which had developed the viruslike particle (VLP) technology licensed for use in Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines -- both designed to prevent HPV infection. The technology, however, is not specific to HPV and companies are working to adapt VLPs and similar techniques for a variety of vaccines, including influenza.