The Ig Nobel Prizes: The Annals of Improbable Research
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《新英格兰医药杂志》
Apart from the money, is the Nobel Prize worthwhile? Dr. Raymond Damadian, who claims to have discovered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), seems to think so, because he went public with an expensive campaign of full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other dailies to protest his exclusion from the 2003 ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, during which two other men received the prize for their work on MRI. We'll have to wait for the full story because the Nobel Committee seals its deliberations for 50 years.
The secretive Swedish committee is the very opposite of the Ig Nobel Board of Governors, a wide-open bunch comprising the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, various journalists and scientists, and, for balance, "some passerby from the street." In contrast to the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize is not monetary — indeed, winners must pay their own way to the annual ceremony in the Sanders Theatre of Harvard University — but it does come with other benefits. One is the privilege of hearing the Heisenberg Certainty Lecture, which is limited to 30 seconds. Another is participation in events like the auction of plaster casts of the left feet of Nobel laureates. One Ig Nobel award ceremony featured a 60-second wedding before 1200 guests. The bride's mother commented, "This wasn't exactly what I would have planned for my daughter . . . but it was even better." I'm not making any of this up.
What about the awards? The Ig Nobel Prizes is a collection of 48 citations spanning 12 years (1991 through 2002), with annotations by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and, when possible, comments of the awardees. I'll mention here mainly prizes for work in medicine, but before I get to them, it's worth pointing to the Ig Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to executives of Enron, Tyco, Merrill Lynch, and other similar companies for giving new life to the subject of imaginary numbers. Jacques Chirac, president of France, was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific." And the British Standards Institution received the Prize in Literature for BS 6008, six pages of instructions for making a cup of tea.
Among my favorites for notable advances in medicine: to Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari for their discovery that nose picking is common among adolescents; to Carl Charnetski and colleagues for showing that elevator music prevents the common cold; to a group of Dutch physicians for their peek into coitus using MRI (a thin couple were squeezed into the machine and instructed to copulate); and to Peter Barss for demonstrating that people who stand beneath palm trees risk head injury from falling coconuts. A few others, not in medicine, but with clinical relevance: the physics prize to Deepak Chopra for quantum healing and the statistics prize to Bain and Siminoski for disproving the widely held belief that penile length correlates with height and foot size. And best for last: the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature to Eric Topol and his colleagues for publishing a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine with 976 coauthors. This group of cardiologists, who quite appropriately call themselves the GUSTO investigators, could not attend the ceremony. The prize was received on their behalf by Dr. Marcia Angell, then the executive editor of the Journal, who in her gracious acceptance speech wryly noted, "This is all a part of our continuous author-enhancement campaign."
If you think that any of the foregoing is fake, look it up. I checked about 20 randomly selected awards (the descriptions of the prize work bear citations) and verified that the articles in question were actually published or, in the case of patents for inventions, that they were indeed granted by the U.S. Patent Office. Some of the journals that published these articles — the British Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine, for example — are, some believe, otherwise upstanding. And yes, there is a patent for "protective underwear with malodorous flatus filter," meant to protect against flatus released by your close ones. It's all real — or surreal.
The Ig Nobel Prizes is a hilarious commentary on human folly. The editors of the Annals of Improbable Research (which is also real), and especially author Abrahams, have a keen eye for the ridiculous. Highly recommended for a change of pace.
Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
rschwartz@nejm.org(By Marc Abrahams. 240 pp.)
The secretive Swedish committee is the very opposite of the Ig Nobel Board of Governors, a wide-open bunch comprising the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, various journalists and scientists, and, for balance, "some passerby from the street." In contrast to the Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize is not monetary — indeed, winners must pay their own way to the annual ceremony in the Sanders Theatre of Harvard University — but it does come with other benefits. One is the privilege of hearing the Heisenberg Certainty Lecture, which is limited to 30 seconds. Another is participation in events like the auction of plaster casts of the left feet of Nobel laureates. One Ig Nobel award ceremony featured a 60-second wedding before 1200 guests. The bride's mother commented, "This wasn't exactly what I would have planned for my daughter . . . but it was even better." I'm not making any of this up.
What about the awards? The Ig Nobel Prizes is a collection of 48 citations spanning 12 years (1991 through 2002), with annotations by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and, when possible, comments of the awardees. I'll mention here mainly prizes for work in medicine, but before I get to them, it's worth pointing to the Ig Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to executives of Enron, Tyco, Merrill Lynch, and other similar companies for giving new life to the subject of imaginary numbers. Jacques Chirac, president of France, was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific." And the British Standards Institution received the Prize in Literature for BS 6008, six pages of instructions for making a cup of tea.
Among my favorites for notable advances in medicine: to Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari for their discovery that nose picking is common among adolescents; to Carl Charnetski and colleagues for showing that elevator music prevents the common cold; to a group of Dutch physicians for their peek into coitus using MRI (a thin couple were squeezed into the machine and instructed to copulate); and to Peter Barss for demonstrating that people who stand beneath palm trees risk head injury from falling coconuts. A few others, not in medicine, but with clinical relevance: the physics prize to Deepak Chopra for quantum healing and the statistics prize to Bain and Siminoski for disproving the widely held belief that penile length correlates with height and foot size. And best for last: the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature to Eric Topol and his colleagues for publishing a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine with 976 coauthors. This group of cardiologists, who quite appropriately call themselves the GUSTO investigators, could not attend the ceremony. The prize was received on their behalf by Dr. Marcia Angell, then the executive editor of the Journal, who in her gracious acceptance speech wryly noted, "This is all a part of our continuous author-enhancement campaign."
If you think that any of the foregoing is fake, look it up. I checked about 20 randomly selected awards (the descriptions of the prize work bear citations) and verified that the articles in question were actually published or, in the case of patents for inventions, that they were indeed granted by the U.S. Patent Office. Some of the journals that published these articles — the British Medical Journal and the New England Journal of Medicine, for example — are, some believe, otherwise upstanding. And yes, there is a patent for "protective underwear with malodorous flatus filter," meant to protect against flatus released by your close ones. It's all real — or surreal.
The Ig Nobel Prizes is a hilarious commentary on human folly. The editors of the Annals of Improbable Research (which is also real), and especially author Abrahams, have a keen eye for the ridiculous. Highly recommended for a change of pace.
Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
rschwartz@nejm.org(By Marc Abrahams. 240 pp.)