Winners of the Ig® Nobel Prize
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The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
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 and a sumo wrestler.
[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
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
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
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. [REFERNCE: "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. Tobaccco,
Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, and
the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson
Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as
testified to the US
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, 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 in
"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.
PHYSICS
The Japanese Meterological Agency, for its seven-year study of
whether earthquakes
are caused by catfish wiggling their tails.
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.
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,
the Cap
Snaffler, 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.]
MATHEMATICS
Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful
seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds
(8,606,091,751,882:1) 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 Brunquiel.
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.
PHYSICS (*)
Thomas Kyle, detector of atoms and original man of knowledge, for
his discovery of the heaviest element in the universe,
Administratium.
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.
INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH (*)
Josiah Carberry of Brown University, bold explorer and eclectic
seeker of knowledge, for his pioneering work in the field of
Psychoceramics, the study of cracked pots.
EDUCATION
J. Danforth Quayle, consumer
of time and occupier of space, for
demonstrating,
better than anyone else, the need for science
education.
PEDESTRIAN TECHNOLOGY (*)
Paul DeFanti, wizard of structures and crusader for public safety,
for his invention of the Buckybonnet, a geodesic fashion structure
that pedestrians wear to protect their heads and preserve their
composure.
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. That year three of the Prizes (indicated above by
*) were given for apocryphal achievements. All the other Prizes -- including
ALL prizes awarded in all subsequent years -- were awarded for genuine
achievements.
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