Winners of the Ig® Nobel Prize
The winners have all done things that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.
2005... 2004... 2003... 2002... 2001... 2000... 1999... 1998... 1997... 1996... 1995... 1994... 1993... 1992... 1991.
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"The Ig Nobel awards are arguably
the highlight of the scientific calendar."
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The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, October 6, at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. You can watch archived video of the live webcast.
AGRICULTURAL HISTORY: James
Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, "The
Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers."
REFERENCE: "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers:
Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming
between the World Wars," James Watson, Agricultural History, vol. 78, no.
3, Summer 2004, pp. 346-60.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Watson
PHYSICS: John
Mainstone and the late Thomas
Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting
an experiment
that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has
been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately
one drop every nine years.
REFERENCE: "The
Pitch Drop Experiment," R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell,
European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Mainstone
MEDICINE: Gregg
A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles
-- artificial replacement testicles for dogs, which are available
in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness.
REFERENCES: US Patent #5868140, and the book Going
Going NUTS!, by Gregg A. Miller, PublishAmerica, 2004, ISBN 1413753167.
ACCEPTING: The winner was unable to travel, and delivered his acceptance
speech via video.
LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.
PEACE: Claire
Rind and Peter
Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically
monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust
was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star
Wars."
REFERENCE: "Orthopteran
DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective
Responses to Approaching Objects," F.C. Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal
of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Claire Rind
ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an
alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that
people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive
hours to the workday.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Gauri Nanda
CHEMISTRY: Edward
Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian
Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin,
for conducting a careful
experiment to settle the longstanding
scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup
or in water?
REFERENCE: "Will
Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?" American Institute of Chemical
Engineers Journal, Brian Gettelfinger and E. L. Cussler, vol. 50, no. 11,
October 2004, pp. 2646-7.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler
BIOLOGY: Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the
University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva,
Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig
Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia;
Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University
of Adelaide; and Yoji
Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly
smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species
of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.
REFERENCE: "A
Survey of Frog Odorous Secretions, Their Possible Functions and Phylogenetic
Significance," Benjamin P.C. Smith, Craig R. Williams, Michael
J. Tyler, and Brian D. Williams, Applied Herpetology, vol. 2, no. 1-2, February
1, 2004, pp. 47-82.
REFERENCE: "Chemical
and Olfactory Characterization of Odorous Compounds and Their Precursors
in the Parotoid Gland Secretion of the Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea,"
Benjamin P.C. Smith, Michael J. Tyler, Brian D. Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka,
Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol. 29, no. 9, September 2003.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ben Smith and Craig Williams
NUTRITION: Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats of
Tokyo, Japan, for photographing and retrospectively analyzing
every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting).
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Dr.
Yoshiro Nakamats
FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow
of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu,
Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary,
for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds
up inside a penguin, as detailed
in their report "Pressures
Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation."
PUBLISHED IN: Polar
Biology, vol. 27, 2003, pp. 56-8.
ACCEPTING: The winners were unable to attend the ceremony because they could
not obtain United States visas to visit the United States. Dr. Meyer-Rochow
sent an acceptance
speech via video.
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
The 2004 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, September 30, at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. You can watch archived video of the live webcast.
MEDICINE
Steven Stack of Wayne
State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James
Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published
report "The
Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
PUBLISHED IN: Social Forces, vol.
71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: James Gundlach.
PHYSICS
Ramesh Balasubramaniam
of the University of Ottawa, and Michael
Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for
exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
REFERENCE: "Coordination
Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping," Ramesh Balasubramaniam
and Michael T. Turvey, Biological
Cybernetics, vol. 90, no. 3, March 2004, pp. 176-90.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ramesh Balasubramaniam and Michael Turvey.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Jillian
Clarke of the Chicago
High School for Agricultural Sciences, and then Howard University, for
investigating
the scientific validity of the Five-Second Rule about whether it's safe
to eat food that's been dropped on the floor.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Jillian Clarke
CHEMISTRY
The Coca-Cola Company of
Great Britain, for using advanced technology to convert ordinary tap
water into Dasani,
a transparent form of water, which for precautionary reasons has been made
unavailable to consumers.
ENGINEERING
Donald
J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith, of Orlando Florida,
USA, for patenting the combover (U.S.
Patent #4,022,227).
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Donald Smith's son, Scott Jackson Smith,
and daughter, Heather Smith.
LITERATURE
The American Nudist Research Library
of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone
can see it.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Pamela Chestek, the daughter of ANRL
director Helen Fisher.
PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons
of the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher
Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay
close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else
-- even a woman in a gorilla suit.
REFERENCE: "Gorillas
in Our Midst," Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol.
28, Perception, 1999, pages
1059-74.
DEMO: <http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
ECONOMICS
The Vatican, for outsourcing
prayers to India.
PEACE
Daisuke Inoue of Hyogo,
Japan, for inventing
karaoke, thereby providing an entirely
new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Daisuke Inoue.
BIOLOGY
Ben Wilson of the University
of British Columbia, Lawrence
Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert
Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus
Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg
of Sweden's National Board of
Fisheries, for showing that herrings
apparently communicate by farting.
REFERENCE: "Sounds
Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release," Magnus Wahlberg
and Håkan Westerberg, Aquatic
Living Resources, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 271-5.
REFERENCE: "Pacific
and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds," Ben Wilson, Robert
S. Batty and Lawrence M. Dill, Biology
Letters, vol. 271, 2003, pp. S95-S97.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lawrence Dill, Robert Batty, Magnus
Whalberg, Hakan Westerberg.
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
The 2003 Ig Nobel Prize winners were announced on Thursday evening, October 2, at the 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre. Click here for details. The ceremony was telecast live on the Internet (click here to watch an archived videocast).
ENGINEERING
The late John
Paul Stapp, the late Edward A. Murphy, Jr., and George Nichols, for
jointly giving birth in 1949 to Murphy's Law, the basic engineering principle
that "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those
ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do it" (or, in other
words: "If anything can go wrong, it will").
REFERENCE: "The
Fastest Man on Earth," Nick T. Spark, Annals of Improbable Research,
vol. 9, no. 5, Sept/Oct 2003.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: (1) Author Nick T. Spark , on behalf
of John Paul Stapp's widow, Lilly. (2) Edward Murphy's Edward A. Murphy
III, on behalf of his late father. (3) George Nichols, via audio tape.
PHYSICS
Jack
Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren
Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David
Stuart, and Robyn Williams of Australia, for their irresistible report
"An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces."
[PUBLISHED IN: Applied Ergonomics, vol. 33, no. 6, November 2002, pp. 523-31.
A copy can be downloaded from http://www.culvenor.com/]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Culvenor.
MEDICINE
Eleanor Maguire,
David Gadian, Ingrid
Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John
Ashburner, Richard
Frackowiak, and Christopher
Frith of University College London, for presenting evidence that the
brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their
fellow citizens.
[PUBLISHED IN: "Navigation-Related
Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers," Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 97, no. 8, April 11, 2000, pp.
4398-403. Also see their subsequent publications.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Eleanor Maguire.
PSYCHOLOGY
Gian Vittorio Caprara
and Claudio Barbaranelli
of the University of Rome, and Philip
Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their discerning report "Politicians'
Uniquely Simple Personalities."
[PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Philip Zimbardo.
CHEMISTRY
Yukio
Hirose of Kanazawa University, for his chemical investigation of a bronze
statue, in the city of Kanazawa, that fails to attract pigeons.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Yukio
Hirose.
LITERATURE
John
Trinkaus, of the Zicklin School
of Business, New York City, for meticulously collecting data and publishing
more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him
(such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak
facing to the rear rather than to the front; What percentage of pedestrians
wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; What percentage
of swimmers swim laps in the shallow end of a pool rather than the deep
end; What percentage of automobile drivers almost, but not completely, come
to a stop at one particular stop-sign; What percentage of commuters carry
attaché cases; What percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items
permitted in a supermarket's express checkout lane; and What percentage
of students dislike the taste of Brussels sprouts.)
REFERENCE: 86 of Professor Trinkaus's publications are listed in "Trinkaus
-- An Informal Look," Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 9, no.
3, May/Jun 2003.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Trinkaus.
ECONOMICS
Karl Schwärzler and the nation of
Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent
the entire country for corporate conventions,
weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.
REFERENCE: <www.xnet.li> and <www.rentastate.com>
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Karl Schwärzler.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Stefano Ghirlanda,
Liselotte
Jansson, and Magnus
Enquist of Stockholm University, for their inevitable report "Chickens
Prefer Beautiful Humans."
[PUBLISHED IN: Human Nature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9.]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: All three co-authors.
PEACE
Lal
Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India,
for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading
an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second,
for waging a lively
posthumous campaign against bureaucratic
inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association
of Dead People.
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of
being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government
so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S.
government refused to allow him into the country. His friend Madhu Kapoor
therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf
of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the
Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India.
[NOTE: Filmmaker
Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life)
of Lal Bihari.]
BIOLOGY
C.W. Moeliker, of Natuurmuseum
Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for documenting the first scientifically
recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
[REFERENCE: "The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard
Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)" C.W. Moeliker, Deinsea, vol. 8,
2001, pp. 243-7. Photographs can be viewed at <http://www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm>]
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Kees Moeliker.
The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
BIOLOGY
Norma E. Bubier, Charles
G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D.
Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report "Courtship
Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain."
[REFERENCE: "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards
Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain," Norma E. Bubier, Charles
G.M. Paxton, P. Bowers, D.C. Deeming, British
Poultry Science, vol. 39, no. 4, September 1998, pp. 477-481.]
PHYSICS
Arnd
Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating
that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE:
"Demonstration
of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European
Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.]
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive
survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color,
and how much.
CHEMISTRY
Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research,
in Champaign, Illinois, for
gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into
the form of a four-legged
periodic table table.
MATHEMATICS
K.P. Sreekumar and the
late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University,
India, for their analytical
report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."
[REFERENCE: "Estimation
of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus),"
K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary
Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.]
LITERATURE
Vicki
L. Silvers of the University of Nevada-Reno and David
S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful
report "The
Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension."
[ PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research
and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23.]
PEACE
Keita Sato, President
of Takara Co., Dr.
Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr.
Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure
Veterinary Hospital, for promoting
peace and harmony
between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual,
a computer-based automatic dog-to-human
language translation device.
HYGIENE
Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste,
in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing
a washing machine for cats and dogs.
ECONOMICS
The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut &
Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan],
Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing,
HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK],
McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications,
Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management,
WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept
of imaginary
numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE: all companies are U.S.-based
unless otherwise noted.]
MEDICINE
Chris McManus of University
College London, for his excruciatingly balanced
report, "Scrotal Asymmetry
in Man and in Ancient Sculpture." [PUBLISHED IN: Nature,
vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]
The 2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries
Due to Falling Coconuts." [PUBLISHED IN: The
Journal of Trauma, vol. 24, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.]
PHYSICS
David
Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial
solution to the
question of why shower curtains billow inwards.
BIOLOGY
Buck Weimer of Pueblo,
Colorado for inventing Under-Ease,
airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling
gases before they escape.
ECONOMICS
Joel Slemrod,
of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech
Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved
to Columbia University], for their conclusion that people find a way to
postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on
the inheritance tax. [REFERENCE:"Dying
to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity,"
National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.]
LITERATURE
John Richards
of Boston, England, founder of The
Apostrophe Protection Society, for his
efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural
and possessive.
PSYCHOLOGY
Lawrence W. Sherman
of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An
Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children."
[PUBLISHED IN: Child Development,
vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.]
ASTROPHYSICS
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van
Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries,
Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill
all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. [REFERENCE: The
March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack
Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).]
PEACE
Viliumas
Malinauskus of Grutas,
Lithuania, for creating
the
amusement park known as "Stalin
World"
TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting
the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian
Patent Office for granting
him Innovation
Patent #2001100012.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and
B.S. Srihari of the National
Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for
their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among
adolescents. [REFERENCE: "A
Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample,"
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry,
vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.]
The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
PSYCHOLOGY
David
Dunning of Cornell University and Justin
Kreuger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled
and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence
Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." [Published in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999,
pp. 1121-34.]
LITERATURE
Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen
Greve) of Australia,
first
lady of Breatharianism, for
her book "Living
on Light," which explains
that although some people do eat food, they don't
ever really need to.
BIOLOGY
Richard Wassersug
of Dalhousie
University, for his first-hand report, "On the Comparative Palatability
of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles
from Costa Rica."
[Published in The American Midland
Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.]
PHYSICS
Andre Geim of
the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir
Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets
to levitate a frog.
[REFERENCE: "Of Flying
Frogs and Levitrons" by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European
Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]
CHEMISTRY
Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni
B. Cassano of the University of Pisa,
and Hagop
S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery
that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having
severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. [REFERENCE: "Alteration
of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love," Marazziti D,
Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB, Psychological
Medicine, 1999 May;29(3):741-5.]
ECONOMICS
The Reverend Sun
Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency
and steady growth to the mass-marriage
industry, with, according to his reports,
a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple
wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding
in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding
in 1997.
MEDICINE
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen,
The Netherlands, and Ida
Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating
report, "Magnetic
Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual
Arousal." [Published in British Medical
Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.]
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense,
software
that detects when a
cat is walking across your computer keyboard.
PEACE
The British Royal Navy, for
ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead
just shout "Bang!"
PUBLIC HEALTH
Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullet of Glasgow,
for their alarming report, "The
Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow." [Published in the Scottish Medical
Journal, vol. 38, 1993, p. 185.]
The 1999 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
SOCIOLOGY
Steve
Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his
PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian
donut shops.
PHYSICS
Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England
and Sydney, Australia for calculating
the optimal
way to dunk a biscuit.
...and...
Professor Jean-Marc
Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium,
for calculating how to
make a teapot spout that does not drip.
LITERATURE
The British Standards Institution
for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup
of tea.
SCIENCE EDUCATION
The Kansas State Board of Education
and the Colorado State
Board of Education, for mandating
that children should
not believe in Darwin's
theory of
evolution any more than they believe
in Newton's
theory
of gravitation, Faraday's
and Maxwell's
theory of electromagnetism,
or Pasteur's
theory that
germs cause disease.
MEDICINE
Dr. Arvid
Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating
which kinds of containers his patients chose when
submitting urine samples. (REFERENCE: "Unyttig om urinprøver," Arvid
Vatle, Tidsskift
for Den norske laegeforening [The Journal of the Norwegian
Medical Association], no.
8, March 20, 1999, p. 1178.)
CHEMISTRY
Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety
Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check,
an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.
BIOLOGY
Dr. Paul
Bosland, director of The
Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New
Mexico, for breeding
a spiceless
jalapeno chile pepper.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul,
Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business
suit.
PEACE
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing
an automobile
burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a
flamethrower.
MANAGED HEALTH CARE
The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California,
for inventing a device (US
Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth -- the woman is strapped
onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.
The 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
SAFETY ENGINEERING
Troy
Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and
personally testing a suit
of armor that is impervious to grizzly
bears. [REFERENCE: "Project
Grizzly", produced by the "National
Film
Board of Canada.]
BIOLOGY
Peter Fong of Gettysburg
College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for
contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.
[REFERENCE: "Induction and Potentiation of Parturition
in
Fingernail
Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-
Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)," Peter F. Fong, Peter T. Huminski, and
Lynette M. D'urso, "Journal
of Experimental Zoology, vol. 280,
1998, pp. 260-64.]
PEACE
Prime
Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime
Minister Nawaz
Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful
explosions of atomic bombs.
CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste of France, for
his homeopathic
discovery that
not only does water have memory, but that the information can be
transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet.
[NOTE: Benveniste also won the 1991 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize.]
[REFERENCE:"Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by
Telephone Link," J. Benveniste, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa,
"Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology - Program and
abstracts of papers to be presented during scientific sessions
AAAAI/AAI.CIS Joint Meeting February 21-26, 1997"]
SCIENCE EDUCATION
Dolores Krieger,
Professor Emerita, New York University, for
demonstrating the merits of therapeutic
touch, a method by which
nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by
carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.
STATISTICS
Jerald
Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in
Toronto and Kerry Siminoski
of the University
of Alberta for their carefully measured report,
"The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."
[Published in "Annals of Sex Research," vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp.
231-5.
PHYSICS. Deepak Chopra of The Chopra
Center for Well Being, La
Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum
physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
economic happiness. [REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra's books "Quantum
Healing,"
"Ageless
Body, Timeless Mind," etc.]
ECONOMICS. Richard Seed
of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the
world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.
MEDICINE
To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn,
David Kelly,
and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport,
Wales, for the cautionary medical report, "A Man Who Pricked His
Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years." [Published in "The
Lancet," vol. 348, November 9, 1996,
p. 1282.]
LITERATURE
Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington,
DC, for her illuminating report,
"Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread." [Published in
"Journal
of Analytical Psychology," vol. 41, no. 2, 1996, pp. 165-78.]
The 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
(Click here for details about the ceremony)
BIOLOGY
T. Yagyu and his colleagues from the University Hospital
of Zurich, Switzerland, from Kansai Medical University in Osaka,
Japan, and from Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech
Republic, for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they
chewed different flavors of gum. [Published as "Chewing
gum flavor
affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG," T.
Yagyu, et al., Neuropsychobiology,
vol. 35, 1997, pp. 46-50.]
ENTOMOLOGY
Mark Hostetler
of the University of Florida, for his
scholarly book, "That
Gunk on Your Car," which identifies
the
insect splats that appear on automobile windows. [The book is
published by Ten Speed Press.]
ASTRONOMY
Richard Hoagland
of New Jersey, for identifying
artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human
face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the
moon. [REFERENCE: "The
Monuments of Mars : A City on the Edge of
Forever,"
by Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley,
CA,1996.]
COMMUNICATIONS
Sanford Wallace,
president of Cyber Promotions
of
Philadelphia -- neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have
stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk
mail to all the world.
PHYSICS
John Bockris of Texas
A&M University, for his wide-
ranging achievements in cold
fusion, in the transmutation
of base
elements
into gold, and in the electrochemical
incineration of
domestic
rubbish.
LITERATURE
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu
Rips and Yoav Rosenberg of
Israel, and Michael Drosnin of the United States, for their
hairsplitting statistical
discovery that the bible contains a
secret, hidden code.[REFERENCE: Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg,'s
original research was published as"Equidistant
Letter Sequences in
the
Book of Genesis," "Statistical Science," Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994,
pp. 429-38. Drosnin's popular book, "The
Bible Code," was
published by Simon & Schuster.]
MEDICINE
Carl J. Charnetski
and Francis X. Brennan, Jr. of Wilkes
University, and James F. Harrison of Muzak
Ltd. in Seattle,
Washington, for their discovery that listening
to elevator Muzak
stimulates
immunoblobulin A (IgA) production, and thus may help
prevent
the common cold.
ECONOMICS
Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki
Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo,
the father and mother of
Tamagotchi, for diverting
millions of person-hours of work into
the husbandry of virtual pets.
PEACE
Harold
Hillman of the University of Surrey,
England for his
lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report "The Possible
Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods."
[Published in "Perception 1993," vol 22, pp. 745-53.]
METEOROLOGY
Bernard Vonnegut of
the State University of Albany,
for his revealing report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado
Wind Speed." [Published in "Weatherwise,"
October 1975, p. 217.]
The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
BIOLOGY
Anders Barheim and
Hogne Sandvik of the
University of Bergen,
Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, "Effect
of Ale,
Garlic, and Soured
Cream on the Appetite of Leeches." [Published
in "British Medical Journal," vol. 309, Dec 24-31, 1994, p. 1689.]
MEDICINE
James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobacco,
Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris,
Edward A. Horrigan of Liggett Group, Donald S. Johnston of American
Tobacco Company, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of
Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery,
as
testified to the U.S.
Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.
PHYSICS
Robert Matthews
of Aston University, England, for his
studies of
Murphy's
Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast
often
falls on the buttered side. [REFERENCE: "Tumbling
toast, Murphy's
Law and
the fundamental constants," "European Journal of Physics,"
vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.]
PEACE
Jacques Chirac,
President of France, for commemorating the
fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic
bomb tests in the
Pacific.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald
Moi of Oslo, Norway,
for their cautionary medical report "Transmission of Gonorrhea
Through an Inflatable Doll." [Published in "Genitourinary
Medicine," vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993,
p. 322.]
CHEMISTRY
George
Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record
time for igniting a barbeque grill-three seconds, using charcoal
and liquid oxygen.
BIODIVERSITY
Chonosuke Okamura
of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya,
Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons,
princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct "mini-species," each
of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length. [REFERENCE: the
series "Reports
of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory," published by
the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970's
and 1980's.]
LITERATURE
The editors of the journal "Social
Text," for eagerly publishing
research that they could not understand, that the author said was
meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. [The
paper was "Transgressing
the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Alan
Sokal, "Social Text,"
Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.
ECONOMICS
Dr. Robert J. Genco
of the University of Buffalo for his discovery
that "financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive
periodontal disease.
ART
Don Featherstone
of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally
evolutionary invention,
the plastic pink flamingo.
[REFERENCE: "Pink
Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass"]
The 1995 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
NUTRITION
John Martinez of
J.
Martinez & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, for Luak
Coffee,
the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from
coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm
civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.
PHYSICS
D.M.R.
Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, of the Institute
of
Food Research, Norwich, England, for their rigorous analysis of
soggy breakfast cereal, published in the report entitled 'A Study
of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of
Breakfast Cereal Flakes." [Published in "Powder
Technology,"
November, 1994, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 189-96.]
ECONOMICS
Awarded jointly to Nick
Leeson and his superiors at Barings
Bank
and to Robert Citron
of Orange
County, California, for using the
calculus of derivatives
to demonstrate that every financial
institution has its limits. [REFERENCE: "Barings
Lost : Nick
Leeson
and the Collapse of Barings Plc," and "Big
Bets Gone
Bad"]
MEDICINE
Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, and Michael R.
Boyle, for their invigorating study entitled "The
Effects of
Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition." [Published in
"International
Journal of Neuroscience," vol. 57, 1991, pp. 239-
249.]
LITERATURE
David B. Busch and James
R. Starling, of Madison Wisconsin, for
their deeply penetrating research report, "Rectal
foreign bodies:
Case Reports and a Comprehensive
Review of the World's
Literature." The citations
include reports of, among other items:
seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire
spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven
different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a
jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a beer glass; and
one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of
spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine.
[Published in "Surgery,"
September 1986, pp. 512-519.]
PEACE
The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians
gain more by punching,
kicking and gouging each other than by
waging war against other nations.
PSYCHOLOGY
Shigeru Watanabe,
Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio
University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate
between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet. [REFERENCE:
"Pigeons'
Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso,"
"Journal
of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," vol. 63, 1995,
pp. 165-174.]
PUBLIC HEALTH
Martha Kold Bakkevig of Sintef
Unimed in Trondheim, Norway, and
Ruth Nielson of the Technical University of
Denmark, for their
exhaustive study, "Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory
Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold." [Published in
"Ergonomics,"
vol 37, no. 8, Aug. 1994 , pp. 1375-89.]
DENTISTRY
Robert H. Beaumont, of Shoreview,
Minnesota, for his incisive
study "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss."
[Published in "Journal
of Periodontology," vol. 61, no. 2, Feb.
1990, pp. 123-5.]
CHEMISTRY
Bijan Pakzad of Beverly
Hills, for creating DNA
Cologne and DNA
PERFUME,
neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic
acid, and both
of which come in a triple helix
bottle.
The 1994 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
BIOLOGY
W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton, and
Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, "The Constipated
Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops," and especially
for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency.
[Published in "Military
Medicine," vol. 158, August, 1993, pp.
346-348.]
PEACE
John
Hagelin of Maharishi University and
The Institute of Science,
Technology and Public Policy, promulgator
of peaceful thoughts,
for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators
caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington,
D.C.
[REFERENCE: "Interim Report: Results
of the National Demonstration
Project
To Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental
Effectiveness
In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993,"
Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield,
Iowa"]
MEDICINE
This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly
of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his
pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy --
at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to
his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes.
Second, to Dr.
Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center
and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health
Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: "Failure
of Electric Shock Treatment
for Rattlesnake Envenomation."
[Published in "Annals of Emergency
Medicine," vol. 20, no. 6, June
1991, pp. 659-61.]
ENTOMOLOGY
Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend
of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in
obtaining ear mites from
cats, inserting them into his own ear,
and carefully observing and analyzing the results. [Published as "Of
Mites and Man,"
The
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association,
vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-7.]
PSYCHOLOGY
Lee
Kuan Yew, former
Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of
the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year
study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of
Singapore whenever they spat,
chewed gum, or fed pigeons.
LITERATURE
L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding
father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book, "Dianetics,"
which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.
CHEMISTRY
Texas State Senator Bob
Glasgow, wise writer of logical
legislation, for sponsoring the 1989
drug control law which make
it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other
laboratory
glassware without a permit.
ECONOMICS
Jan Pablo Davila
of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures
and former employee of the state-owned Codelco
Company, for
instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and
subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making
increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent
of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement
inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb: " davilar," meaning,
"to botch things up royally."
MATHEMATICS
The Southern Baptist
Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of
morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama
citizens will go to Hell
if they don't repent.
[Click here for additional details.]
The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
PSYCHOLOGY
John Mack
of Harvard Medical School and David
Jacobs of Temple
University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that
people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space,
probably were -- and especially for their conclusion "the focus of
the abduction is the production of children. [REFERENCE: "Secret
Life
: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions"]
CONSUMER ENGINEERING
Ron
Popeil, incessant inventor and perpetual
pitchman of late
night television, for redefining the industrial revolution with
such devices as the Veg-O-Matic,
the Pocket Fisherman,
Mr. Microphone,
and the Inside-the-Shell
Egg Scrambler.
[REFERENCE: "The
Salesman of the Century : Inventing, Marketing,
and
Selling on TV : How I Did It and How You Can Too!"]
BIOLOGY
Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon
State Health Division and Kenneth
W. Newell of the Liverpool
School of Tropical Medicine, bold
biological detectives, for their pioneering study, "Salmonella
Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs." [Published in American Journal of
Public Health and the Nation's Health, vol. 60, no. 5, May 1970,
pp. 926-9.]
ECONOMICS
Ravi Batra of
Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and
best-selling author of "The
Great Depression of 1990" ($17.95) and
"Surviving
the Great Depression of 1990" ($18.95), for selling
enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide
economic collapse.
PEACE
The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines,
suppliers of sugary
hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a
millionaire, and then announcing the
wrong winning number, thereby
inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and
bringing many warring factions together for the first time in
their nation's history.
VISIONARY TECHNOLOGY
Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan,
crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that
makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same
time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal
to do so.
CHEMISTRY
James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee,
dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent
strips, the
odious
method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.
LITERATURE
E.
Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and
their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical
research paper
which has one hundred times as many authors as pages.
[The study was published in The New England
Journal of
Medicine, vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82. The authors
are from the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany,
Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain,
Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.]
[Click here for additional details.]
MATHEMATICS
Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful
seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds
(710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Mikhail
Gorbachev is the Antichrist.
[REFERENCE: "Gorbachev!
Has the Real Antichrist Come?"]
PHYSICS
Louis Kervran
of France, ardent admirer of alchemy, for his
conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a
process of cold fusion.
REFERENCE: "Biological
Transmutations and
their
applications in: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Ecology,
Medicine,
Nutrition, Agronomy, Geology"]
MEDICINE
James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr.,
medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report,
"Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped
Penis." [Published
in Journal
of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1990,
pp. 305-7.]
The 1992 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
MEDICINE
F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata
of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering
research study "Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for
Foot Malodour," especially for their conclusion that people who
think they have foot
odor do, and those who don't, don't.
[Published in British
Journal of Dermatology, vol. 122, no. 6,
June 1990, pp. 771-6.]
ARCHEOLOGY
Eclaireurs de France,
the Protestant youth group whose name means
"those who show the way," fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for
erasing the ancient
paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres
Cave
near the French village of Bruniquel.
ECONOMICS
The investors of Lloyds
of London, heirs to 300 years of dull
prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by
refusing to pay
for their company's losses.
BIOLOGY
Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and
prolific
patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple,
single-handed method of quality
control. [REFERENCE: "The
Babymaker
: Fertility Fraud and the Fall of Dr. Cecil
Jacobson"]
CHEMISTRY
Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorfulcolloids,
for her role in
the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the
synthesis of
bright blue
Jell-O.
PHYSICS
David Chorley
and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for
their circular contributions
to field theory
based on the
geometrical destruction of English
crops.
PEACE
Daryl Gates,
former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for
his uniquely compelling methods
of bringing people
together.
NUTRITION
The utilizers of Spam,
courageous consumers of canned comestibles,
for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.
LITERATURE
Yuri Struchkov,
unstoppable author from the Institute of
Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers
he published between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than
one every 3.9 days.
ART
Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his
classic anatomy poster "Penises
of the Animal Kingdom," and to the
U.S. National Endowment for the Arts
for encouraging Mr. Knowlton
to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.
The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer
and dedicated
correspondent of "Nature," for his
persistent discovery that
water, H2O,
is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his
satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all
trace of those events has vanished.
MEDICINE
Alan
Kligerman, deviser of digestive
deliverance, vanquisher of
vapor, and inventor of Beano,
for his pioneering work with anti-
gas liquids that prevent bloat, gassiness, discomfort and
embarassment.
EDUCATION
J. Danforth Quayle, consumer
of time and occupier of space, for
demonstrating,
better than anyone else, the need for science
education.
BIOLOGY
Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet
of propagation,
for his pioneering development of the Repository
for Germinal
Choice,
a sperm
bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians
and Olympians.
ECONOMICS
Michael Milken,
titan of Wall Street and father of the junk
bond,
to whom the world is indebted.
LITERATURE
Erich Von Daniken, visionary raconteur
and author of "Chariots
of
the
Gods," for explaining how human civilization was influenced by
ancient astronauts from outer space.
PEACE
Edward
Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of
the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change
the meaning of peace as we know it.
Did They Really Do These Things?
Are these things real? Yes, indeed. You can look it up. That's why we give you the references.
The only exceptions came in 1991, the very first year that Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded, and 1994. In 1991, three additional Prizes were given for apocryphal achievements. In 1994, one prize was based on what turned out to be erroneous press accounts. Those four apocryphal achievements are not included in the list on this page. ALL the other Prizes, in all years, were awarded for genuine achievements.
For extensive background info and additional reference for many of the past winners, see the books Marc Abrahams has written about Ig Nobel Prizes.