IgNobel Awards to be given on Thursday
October 6, 1998
Researcher Proves Scientists Are
Funny. Some of Them.
By PHILIP J. HILTS
The award ceremony to be held on Thursday at
Harvard University will draw more than 1,100
scientists and their
students. But the occasion will be something less than
solemn.
Paper airplanes will sail from the stage and chants
will rise from the audience as the prize-winners
receive their awards. They will be the newest IgNobel
laureates.
The program includes an extremely brief opera on a
scientific subject, three one-minute scientific
lectures called the Heisenberg Certainty Lectures (with
a stopwatch and a bouncer ready should the speaker pass
the 60-second mark), and a
win-a-date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate drawing.
The IgNobel prizes, to be awarded for the seventh time
this year, celebrate actual published research or other
scientific activities that are, in a word, goofy.
Past winners include Ellen Kleist of Greenland and
Harald Moi of Norway for their disturbing medical
paper, "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable
Doll"; D.M.R. Georget and colleagues of England for
their analysis of why breakfast cereal becomes soggy;
Chonosuke Okamura of Japan for his "discovery" of
humans, horses and dragon fossils, each a complete
skeleton less than one-hundredth of an inch long; and
Robert Matthews of Aston University in England for
demonstrating that toast does indeed fall on the
buttered side.
The man responsible for all this is Marc Abrahams,
editor of Annals of Improbable Research, a journal
sometimes referred to as the "Mad magazine of science."
It is probably the only scientific journal with seven
Nobel laureates and a felon on its editorial board.
Abrahams, 42, is a Harvard-trained mathematician,
former computer software entrepreneur and columnist
whose exploits as editor of the magazine are passing
into legend among academics.
He grew up in Swampscott, Mass., and after his
mathematics and computer studies at Harvard, he
developed educational programs to train people to be
good at decision-making. On the side, though, he was
writing science humor and eventually he submitted some
work to The Journal of Irreproducible Results, the
predecessor of the Annals. He could not find an address
for it, so he wrote to Martin Gardner, a mathematician
and games specialist who had written articles for the
journal. Gardner's reply was unexpectedly enthusiastic.
"Would you like to be editor?" he asked.
The journal lacked an editor and was undergoing other
organizational change. Eventually, Mr. Abrahams wound
up running the new publication. That was in 1990.
Abrahams has since built the journal into an enterprise
that includes dozens of contributors and an editorial
board of distinguish scientists and, of course, the
IgNobels.
In its own way, the journal has high standards. "We
turn down more than 10 pieces for every one we accept,"
Abrahams said. "I think that's a higher rejection rate
than Science or Nature. But then, people think twice
before submitting an article to Science or Nature.
Apparently people don't always think twice before
submitting a piece to us."
The journal's contents are divided between real
scientific papers with a humorous side and unreal ones
with an occasionally serious side. Together, they
demonstrate, as the physics laureate Sheldon Glashow
puts it: "Scientists do have a sense of humor. Some of
them, anyway."
The journal has a paid circulation of 2,000 (at $23 a
year) and the IgNobel Prize presentation annually draws
a sellout crowd of 1,200 to the Sanders Theater, where
it is broadcast on National Public Radio.
There are recurring themes. The engineering study
"Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown," first
reported in The Journal of Irreproducible Results in
the 1950's, later appeared in musical form at the
IgNobel ceremonies. Deborah Henson-Conant, a
professional harpist, had turned the work into a
four-movement orchestral work. "Deborah gives a
demonstration as she plays," Abrahams said, deadpan.
Nor does the journal shy away from exposé. In 1995,
after the Public Broadcasting Service began the show
Barney about a purple dinosaur, the journal published a
report of an investigation that used a wide-field X-ray
device to observe Barney at a shopping mall, and to get
images of Barney's skeletal structure.
"X-ray photographs of Barney have provided our most
astounding observations," wrote the authors, Edward C.
Theriot and Earle E. Spamer of the Academy of Natural
Sciences in Philadelphia, and Arthur E. Bogan of
Freshwater Molluscan Research Center, in Sewell, N.J.
While Barney's external morphology was that of a
bipedal dinosaur, they found, his skeleton was "clearly
hominid both in morphometry and distribution of
osteological elements." They went on, "If a skeleton of
a proto-human cannot be distinguished from that of
Barney, there is a likelihood that some of the skeletal
specimens of early hominids -- "Lucy" for example --
may, in fact, be a skeleton of a Barney ancestor."
The journal has also scored some firsts. One article
suggested that if surgery may have to be repeated,
surgeons should install zippers, not sutures. Surgical
zippers are now actually used in some procedures.
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