Tomas Lindahl Nobel Prize Winner Chemistry 2015
The annual Nobel Prize Awards are being announced in Stockholm and on Tuesday The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 to Swede Tomas Lindahl from the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire. The award is shared with Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar.
Thomas Lindahl is Sweden’s 28th Nobel Laureate and there was a lot of excitement in Sweden about the announcement – the picture desk at Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter contacted me to photograph Tomas.
I was given the address to the Clare Hall Laboratory in Hertfordshire and made my way there – there is always a buzz about this type of assignment, inevitably success lies in team work with those on the news desk and those in the field. On arriving at the lab I was told I was the first media to arrive ‘great’ I thought thinking I would get some exclusive images of Tomas celebrating … only to be escorted to an empty seminar room where I sat alone for an hour until the rest of the media arrived for a press conference. I did however manage to get a small exclusive for the newspaper – I saw Tomas arrive early and he happily allowed me to photograph him in his office, I phoned the news desk and they spoke to Tomas on my mobile and were able to have a very quick interview with him before any other media, those first images and Tomas’s quotes were published straight away on the online edition. The papers London correspondent Pia Gripenberg was at the time of the announcement at the Conservative Conference in Manchester and quite amazingly made it in time to Hertfordshire to have a personal interview with Tomas. After the press conference Tomas and his colleagues celebrated at a hastily-arranged party with plastic cups of champagne & nibbles.
