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Friends and colleagues of Tomas Lindahl, a professor of microbiology at Sweden’s Linkoping University, rushed to congratulate him on winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry earlier this week, but it was a case of mistaken identity. The real winner was another Tomas Lindahl, also Swedish, who works at the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in London. (His prize-winning research centers on how cells repair their DNA.)
The two have been mixed up by fellow scientists for decades, but the confusion reached its peak when friends of the Sweden-based Lindahl deluged him with emails and the local government in Linkoping sent out a congratulatory press release before quickly withdrawing it, the Associated Press reported. The mistaken winner reportedly was in good spirits, telling a local newspaper that “it's sort of fun actually. To be mixed up with a Nobel Prize winner when I'm doing research in chemistry myself.” Referring to December’s Nobel banquet, he added, “But it would be really nice to go to the party.”
