The motto of the annual Ig Nobel prizes is “first make people laugh and then make them think.”
Magazine Hands out Awards for Experimentation
The Annals of Improbable Research is a magazine based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that publishes six issues a year. According to the periodical’s website “It’s packed with genuine, improbable research culled from more than 20,000 science, medical, technical and, academic journals. We also publish original research, and some concoctions.”
While the approach is often humourous, the publication does have many serious academics advising it and contributing. The staff is self-described as a "vast, happy, open conspiracy of many volunteers.”
The much-anticipated Ig Nobel Awards issue recognizes off-the-wall activities in many fields.
Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony
In 2008, The Montreal Gazette described the event: “The Ig Nobels are, without question, the highlight of the awards season for aficionados of the absurd.”
The awards ceremony is held on the Harvard University campus and features real Nobel Prize laureates as guests and presenters. Past winners, such as Dr. Francis Fesmire, who devised a digital, rectal massage as cure for intractable hiccups, sometimes return for the festivities.
Each winner is allowed 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech, and 24 seconds to present lectures on their subjects. There is also a “Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest.”
BBC News (October 6, 2009) reports that the 2009 gala included “A 15-minute risk cabaret concert by the Penny-Wise Guys…during which the band paid special tribute to fraudster Bernie Madoff.”
The Ig Nobel Recipients for 2009
As the organizers themselves put it the "19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony" was held on October 1, 2009. And, some of the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prizes are…The envelope please:
- Health – Dr. Elena Bodnar, who designed a brassiere that can be turned into a protective facemask. The device is such that a second mask can be handed to a needy bystander.
- Peace – Awarded to five scientists at the University of Bern, Switzerland for their discovery that, if a person is going to be whacked over the head with a beer bottle, it’s better that the bottle be full rather than empty. (It’s a moot point though because both full and empty beer bottles are easily capable of fracturing a human skull).
- Economics - The senior executives of four Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa - and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”
- Medicine - Donald L. Unger won for cracking the knuckles of his left hand every day for more than 60 years to find out if this could be a possible cause for arthritis. The results of this selfless experiment on behalf of humanity appear to be inconclusive.
Not Everyone Gets the Ig Nobel Joke
In his 2003 book The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research, Marc Abrahams recounts the story of a real, live Nobel Laureate attending his first Ig Nobels and being interviewed by a British journalist.
She asked if the eminent scientist had enjoyed the affair. “ ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, eyes crinkling in delight. ‘Those people were so funny! Can you imagine if they’d really done those things?’
“The reporter gave a low chuckle. ‘They did do those things.’ ”
The scientist has returned to almost every prize-giving since. Not so Robert May, Baron May of Oxford.
In 1995, he was the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He was angered when a group of scientists from the University of East Anglia in England won an Ig Nobel for explaining why breakfast cereal becomes soggy. Lord May wrote a letter to the awards organizers demanding that scientists from the U.K. not be considered for prizes.
Traditionally, the Ig Nobel ceremony ends with the statement: “If you didn’t win a prize - and especially if you did - better luck next year!”
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