We have reporters who earn the label "intrepid". We sent one eager scribe to this year's Eighth First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Despite obstacles and his own incompetence, he made it. Here is his story.
The first thing noted by anyone entering the 1998 edition of the Ig Nobel Prizes was James "The Amazing" Randi's flaming white beard, glowing seemingly brightly enough to light the room, beaming out from a phalanx of seated dignitaries, almost all dressed in lab coats and numbering four (real) Nobel laureates among them. Next was a Cat-in-the-Hat hat sticking up out of the second row. A man dressed in full catcher's gear and then some anchored an end of the first row.
To the side of the stage nearest the VIPs, a man dressed scalp to toe in silver paint and not much else held a flashlight and served as a human spotlight. Somehow, he blended in with the riotous stage decorations, as did his similarly camouflaged female counterpart on the other side of the stage, whom I did not spot until a few minutes later.
I was late, and missed most of the introductions, but I caught the end of a parade of artwork from the Museum of Bad Art, the last of a series of dignitaries and delegations, and watched it slowly disappear into the crowd as paraders took their seats.
All settled down - relatively - and someone introduced the evening's host, Marc Abrahams, who strode to the podium amid a flight of poorly aerodynamic paper airplanes. As one of the aforementioned Nobel laureates would later remark, it's amazing that in a room full of Harvard students (and faculty), no one could build a paper airplane that flies.
Marc Abrahams earned the role of host because he put this Ig Nobel ceremony together. He edits the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), a paper mag that covers the best, worst, and most bizarre in science - genuine and fake.
AIR awards the Ig Nobel Prizes to individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced" in a ceremony held each year, though Marc later verbally added a more accurate explanation: the awards reward the unusual in science that make you think. With this motive, AIR will usually award the Ig Nobels to individuals in one of two camps, either those with wacky (and I don't use that term lightly) ideas that reveal truth or those with false concepts that reveal the wacky.
The ceremony took place in Sanders Theatre on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. The room started off noisy and increased in volume throughout the evening. Many in the audience, if not most, seemed to have done this before and they chimed in with litanical responses as VIPs were introduced. The whole thing appeared to be a complex inside joke - a lot like a midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", including audience members/participants in costume.
The pre-award festivities owed much to the evening's theme. This edition of the Ig Nobels celebrated duct tape, not least, we suppose, because Manco - makers of Duck Tape duct tape - sponsored the event. That would explain the huge roll of duct tape - five and a half miles of it - out in the lobby.
As the last of a flock of wooden duck weather vanes (and one roll of, presumably, Duck Tape duct tape) flew along a wire from balcony to stage, Marc introduced the "studmuffin of duct tape", Manco Senior Category Manager Angelo Ritson. Angelo, splendid in a tweed jacket with duct tape elbow patches and liner, received one of the evening's loudest welcomes - eerily prescient, as it turned out, for at the conclusion of his speech, Angelo would drop his pants to reveal polka-dot, duct tape boxer shorts.
The guy in the Cat-in-the-Hat hat approached the podium next. Let's see: Cat-in-the-Hat; duct tape; science. Of course! This had to be Lawrence Berkeley scientist Max Sherman, come to fill us in on his famous duct tape research in Dr. Seussian rhyme and cadence. You may have read that Max and colleagues discovered that duct tape is a great adhesive for everything, except ducts. Netsurfer is proud to bring you a Web exclusive scoop: the full text of Max's speech.
Lest we should have left Sanders Theatre fulfilled mentally but yearning for the gladiatorial contests of yore, Nobel laureates Sheldon Glashow (Physics 1979), Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry 1986), William Lipscomb (Chemistry 1976), and Richard Roberts (Medicine 1993) tested the tensile strength of duct tape via the tug-of-war method after Max's presentation. In a two-on-two match, the duct tape lost.
With the introductory theme events out of the way, the show got down to what loosely can be called business with the awarding of the Ig Nobel Prizes. The first recipient, Troy Hurtubise of North Bay, Ont., took the prize for safety engineering. Troy, subject and star of the documentary "Project Grizzly", won for the Ursus Mk VI, the protective suit that inspired that film.
Before Troy spoke, we in the audience watched clips from the film. You know how slapstick TV shows (Monty Python, Benny Hill, etc.) will use rubber-limbed dummies to simulate dangerous stunts like falling off cliffs, getting hit by cars, etc? Troy, in his suit, went through just those trials while testing the Ursus. Huge logs swinging down from 40 feet caught him under the chin. Bikers with baseball bats beat the tar out of him. A helper swung a pickaxe at his chest. A pickup truck at 50 km/h repeatedly rammed him and sent him spinning across a field. It's as funny as it is awesome and no one doubts that Troy in the Ursus Mk VI can withstand the assault of a ticked-off grizzly, which after all was the goal of the project.
In his everpresent buckskin jacket - he also wore it in the movie and to the next day's Ig Nobel lectures and film presentations - Troy gave, in a backwoods Ontario accent, the most philosophical speech we'd hear that night. The suit stood to one side, putting the guy in catching gear to shame and probably inspiring no small amount of envy.
Troy built the suit out of metal mail, titanium, a rubber compound, and, coincidentally, 7,630 feet of duct tape. Troy said duct tape was the only thing he found that would both bond to the titanium and provide a substrate for the liquid rubber.
At first, you can't help but feel Troy is - well, a bit of a weirdo, but the more you hear him give his polished pitch, the more you understand the worthiness of his work. Take a look at Troy Hurtubise, Grizzly RoboCop for a closer look at his past and his potentially amazing future.
Marc nominally awarded the next Ig Nobel, in science education, to Dolores Krieger "for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses supposedly manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients." Dolores founded the therapeutic touch method/movement, in which practitioners use hands and crystals to manipulate the "human energy fields" of subjects, thereby healing them. Therapeutic touch uses neither traditional therapy nor touch.
Dolores didn't show up to receive her prize, which was just as well since 11-year-old Emily Rosa, who accepted the award on her behalf, was the true focus of the honor and applause. Emily received a standing ovation as she took the Ig Nobel trophy from Marc.
Emily, you see, co-authored a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that debunked a basic principle of therapeutic touch, that practitioners can detect any human energy field. As a school science project, Emily tested whether or not they could blindly detect the energy field of Emily's own hand by asking them to "feel" over which of their hands Emily held her own. They could not. Emily expanded her research and with some guidance published her findings in JAMA.
After Emily sat back down with her prize package - a wooden trophy with a plastic duck and a roll of duct tape, a plastic harmonica, two more rolls of duct tape, and an autographed copy of "The Best of Annals of Improbable Research" (Marc Abrahams, ed.) - in hand, the first of the night's Heisenberg Certainty Lectures got underway. Don Barrett, the man in the catcher's gear, enforced each lecture's strict 30-second time limit. The Heisenberg speeches strewn throughout the rest of the evening featured the talents of James Randi among others, but the most important thing I learned from them is that the wave isn't any less annoying when geeks do it than it is at the ballpark.
Peter Kramer, author of "Listening to Prozac", accepted the next award on behalf of Peter Fong, who won for "contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac." In layman's terms, Peter and his colleagues discovered that if you put Prozac in a tank of fingernail clams, the mollusks spew forth babies. "They gave their lives for research," Peter said for Peter, "but at least they got to have sex first."
Hoping to avoid any post-clam lull, duct tape once again grabbed center stage with a fashion show. Do you know Don Featherstone? You should. He won the 1996 Ig Nobel in Art for his invention of the plastic flamingo, and he and wife Nancy have also climbed to the top in the field of duct tape supermodelling. All clothing in this show contained a significant percentage of duct tape, and highlights included a slick, stainproof "intern suit" with built it electronic newsgathering and a pair of anti-flatulence pants. It's amazing what they can do these days with flexible ducts and duct tape.
The Ig Nobels made history that night, as an award went to the first ever repeat winner. Jacques Benveniste further affirmed his fame as he became the first ever person to twice not bother showing up to get his Ig Nobel. No matter. Dudley Herschbach and James Randi accepted the Prize for Chemistry on Jacques's behalf.
Jacques first won the chemistry Prize in 1991 for his supposed discovery that water molecules retain the memory of a solute long after the solution has been diluted to such a degree that, according to Randi, "you'd have to drink 12 swimming pools of water just to ingest one molecule (of solute)." This claim forms the basis for homeopathy, a process by which suckers pay plenty o' bucks for tiny vials of water which provide no better than placebic healing.
This year, Jacques won for discovering that the sound of said dilute water can heal just as well as the water itself (and with that, all agree). Furthermore, if you record the sound, save it as a computer file, and e-mail the file, the recipient can play the file and experience healing. Douglas Herschbach showed up with his own encoded sound of healing water and played it for the audience - let's just say all were flushed with anticipation. Talk about marketing schemes!
Curiously, before the cermony could resume, the four (real) Nobel laureates were brought to center stage and shod in extremely large clown shoes. Why became apparent as Marc announced the next winners amid peals of laughter. Jerry Bain accepted the Ig Nobel for Statistics for himself and colleague Kerry Siminoski for their paper, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size". The doctors found a weak relationship, no doubt to the relief of the 5'5" Jerry and his size 7-1/2 shoes.
Richard Seed, another scientist you may have heard of, took the Ig Nobel in Economics "for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings." Richard would have liked to attend the ceremony in person, but was in Ireland - inadvertently setting up an anonymous heckler with the Heckle of the Night: "Give him a year and he'll do both at once." Richard's son Randall Seed took the Prize instead, and spoke on the effects of nature and nurture in growing a human being. Coming down on the side of nurture, Randall said a clone of his father could never grow up to be another Richard, since he and his brothers would inflict on that clone all the tortures their father inflicted on them.
The rest of the evening's awards went to a broad spectrum of movers, shakers, and quacks, none of whom showed up. Deepak Chopra took the Physics prize "for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness." Mara Sidoli missed her chance to bask in the glory of a personally awarded Ig Nobel in literature for her wind and ground breaking Journal of Analytical Psychology opus, "Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread".
Speaking of explosions and odor - in order - Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan shared the 1998 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for their "aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs." In Wales, Patient Y and his doctors shared the medicine Prize for "A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for five years". Poor Patient Y had "a putrid smell emanating from the affected arm, which could be detected across a large room, and when confined to a smaller examination room became almost intolerable." None of the involved flew the Atlantic to accept, but the lead author's cousin, a Harvard undergrad, presented himself in their place with the good news that Patient Y's personal Hell had in fact been eventually cured.
Two events occupied most of the latter half of the Ig Nobel ceremony, a three-act operetta called "La Forza del Duct Tape" and an auction that suprisingly turned out to be one of the most entertaining parts of the evening. Each of the (real) Nobel laureates present donated a personal collection of objects for the charity auction. William Lipscombe provided a bunch of used shopping lists, Sheldon Glashow contributed a heap of cigar butts, Richard Roberts selected a pile of rejected junk mail, and Martin Perl offered a variety of used chewing gum.
Everyone in the audience knew the shopping lists were genuine, because a slide show showed Lipscombe shopping. I don't know if this will show up in the eventual Netcast, but watching the lab-coated Lipscombe farce his way through a shopping trip was worth the price of admission, even for people who couldn't scam their way into a free press pass.
Bidding began on the gum and slowly made its way to a final bid of $20. Lipscombe's lists had slowly risen to $40 when a sharp bark of $100 echoed through the theater and silenced the crowd. It took a moment for people to realize Troy Hurtubise had made that bid, after which the auctioneer deemed the shopping lists sold.
Fueled with enthusiasm, bidders took the price of the cigar butts up to $109 before rationality (not to mention rationalism) once again took hold of the crowd. Few bids for the junk mail led the auctioneer to halt bidding after a "nice, clear, enunciated $30."
The ceremony drew to a close with the final act of "La Forza del Duct Tape", in which Geraldo (not the real one) runs away with the wife and venture capitalist investor of the man who invented duct tape while his children (played by Nobel laureates) wrap him up in his invention. The concluding number, to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, invited audience participation, though we in the audience needed some prompting to take part.
That, in a nutshell, is an Ig Nobel ceremony. Other online press includes an excellent ABC News article and local Boston outlets.
The ceremony was Netcast, but if you missed it, you can catch a radio version Nov. 27 on NPR's Talk of the Nation - Science Friday with Ira Flatow, at the mention of whose name I now, thanks to the Ig Nobels, know I must chant "Ira! Ira! Ira!"