Organisers of the satirical Ig Nobel prize have announced that this year’s prize ceremony will be held in Switzerland, rather than in the US where it has been held since the prize began in 1991. Concerns about US travel visas for attendees is behind the decision, with the move coming as the Trump administration suspends visa processing from 75 countries, including those in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and eastern Europe.
Marc Abrahams, who created the awards, told the Associated Press that the US has now become ‘unsafe for our guests to visit’. ‘We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the US this year,’ he added.
Abrahams said that the award ceremony is set to take place in Zurich every other year, with other European countries hosting the prize-giving event in between.
The Ig Nobel prizes – which span 10 different categories from chemistry to peace to nutrition – ‘honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think’.
Last year’s Ig Nobel prize for chemistry went to a trio of scientists who proposed a ‘Teflon diet’, where non-stick polymers like polytetrafluoroethylene bulk out food as a calorie-free filler. Other previous awards have been given for understanding why scientists like to lick rocks, analysing the smell of cinema audiences and using ‘drunk’ worms as models for large polymers.
The award ceremony in September each year usually takes place at Harvard University in the US, although the event shifted online during the Covid-19 pandemic. The University of Zurich and institutions in the ETH domain – a part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – will be involved in organising this year’s event, Abrahams said. He added that there are also no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the US.
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