Awards for medicine to kick off week of Nobel decisions

STOCKHOLM, Sweden—With the first Nobel Prize of the year set to be announced Monday, Nobel watchers said possible winners of the physiology or medicine prize could be a pair of British medical researchers who discovered a link between cigarette smoking and cancer or an American microbiologist who broke new ground in the research of cholera.

Speculation rarely proves accurate, however, as the secretive prize committees keep a tight lid on selection proceedings—nominations are not revealed for 50 years. The final decision on the medicine prize is taken by the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet, which will announce the winner on Monday, not earlier than 11:30 a.m..