Welcome to a dazzling 24-hour cinema, featuring short documentaries in collaboration with the Academy Award-winning film director  Orlando von Einsiedel and the designer and artist Fredrik Paulsen.

On 2 July, the Nobel Prize Museum on Stortorget, the main square in Stockholm’s Old Town, will reopen under controlled conditions. New to the museum is a mini-exhibition about viruses, pandemics and the Nobel Prize. Visitors who cannot travel to the museum during the summer can also view the exhibition digitally.

When epidemics and pandemics strike the world, it isn’t just the physical health of people that are impacted but also ways of life, thoughts and feelings. Nobel Laureates in literature have been effected by epidemics and written about life under real and fictive epidemics.

The virus can infect people without them becoming sick. Discoveries in the 1960s enabled both vaccines and tests to prevent the spread.

We have understood since the 19th century that many diseases are caused by microscopic bacteria that cannot be seen by the naked eye. It turned out that there were even smaller contagions: viruses. Research on viruses has been recognized with several Nobel Prizes.

The worst pandemic of the 20th century was the Spanish flu, which swept across the world 1918–1920.

Pandemics have wide-ranging impacts on the economy. Paul Romer and Paul Krugman are two economists who have been active in the public discourse during the coronavirus crisis.

Each year, Yellow fever causes about 30,000 deaths. The vaccine against yellow fever was produced in the 1930s. A work awarded the Nobel Prize.

In the early 1980s, reports began to emerge about young men that suffered from unusual infections and cancers that normally only affect patients with weakened immune systems. It turned out to be a previously unknown epidemic, HIV, which spread rapidly across the world.