From unboiling eggs to the effects of intense kissing, IgNobel Prizes reward good ol' curiosity
The year’s IgNobel Awards were held on September 17, and rewarded research that defines a kind of excellence that still impacts society without managing the sobriety of character that often bags the more vaunted Nobel Prizes. The 25th edition, held as usual at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, and as usual presided over by the magazine Improbable Research‘s editor Marc Abrahams, recognised work done in describing pain, diagnosing appendicitis, the effects of intense kissing and more.
Instituted and first awarded in 1991, the prizes were originally designed to identify work that shouldn’t be reproduced, although that snark has diminished in time. On the flipside, they’re known for juxtaposing meticulously conducted research with the banality of their subjects. For example, the citation for the management prize this year read, “… for discovering that many business leaders developed in childhood a fondness for risk-taking, when they experienced natural disasters that – for them – had no dire personal consequences.” The awarders’ take has been that “The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that make people laugh, and then think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.”
The 2015 literature prize went to Dutch linguists for discovering that a translation of “huh?” existed in almost every language and for unknown reasons. The biology prize got picked up by a Chilean diad that found “that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.”. The physics prize was claimed by scientists who found using the principles of fluid dynamics early last year that many mammals – across species – often took a uniform 21 seconds to take a leak (give or take 13 seconds). The diagnostic medicine prize awardees could actually have hit upon something more useful than you think: diagnosing appendicitis by having patients drive at a fixed speed over a speed-bump. If they experience a sharp pain in certain areas, it’s surgery time. The physiology and entomology prize was co-bagged by Justin Schmidt for developing a relative pain index and Michael Smith for letting himself be stung in 25 parts of his body to find the places most (nostril, upper lip, penis shaft) and least sensitive (skull, middle toe tip, upper arm) to stinging pain. Brave souls all.
The citations also demonstrated how being persistently curious could someday enable you to do things you wouldn’t have thought scientifically (or mathematically) possible. For example, the chemistry prize went to a team from the USA and Australia that figured out how to partially unboil an egg (kudos to Abrahams & co. for being able to go past the paper’s title: “Shear-stress-mediated refolding of proteins from aggregates and inclusion bodies”). The medicine prize may have actually put too fine a point on what everyone probably already knew: kissing does people a world of good, and intense kissing does good intensely. And there’s no point trying to paraphrase the mathematics-prize-winning work: “for trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children.”
However, it’s the work winning the 2015 economics prize that doesn’t deserve to be reproduced at all – and it’s probably telling that it didn’t involve scientists but policemen. Specifically, the prize went to Bangkok Metropolitan Police, which offered to bribe its policemen if they didn’t take bribes from others. The BMP needs to be able to take pride in its work’s illustrious company, which includes the 2008 recession, the invention of virtual animal husbandry as well as the find that people would postpone their deaths, indeed, “if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax”.
