The Ig Nobel prizes were created 35 years ago to playfully parody the Nobel prizes and celebrate research that ‘makes people laugh, then think’. The 36th edition will take place at a ceremony in Switzerland on 3 September and will be broadcast live online. It’s the first time the event will be held outside the US, having relocated due to concerns about attendees’ ability to travel safely to the country.
Chemistry World spoke with Marc Abrahams, who founded the Ig Nobels and hosts the annual award ceremony, just before this year’s winners are set to be announced.
Tell us about your background
I have adored science since I was a little kid. My elementary school math teacher played lots of songs by the musical satirist Tom Lehrer, which I think is a good influence on anybody. But I majored in applied math as an undergraduate because it allowed me to dabble in all kinds of science and do interesting things. I went on to become a computer programmer and eventually started my own software company.
As a child, I wrote all sorts of things about science that I thought was funny and would share it with friends. Later in life, I sent some of my writing off to a satirical science magazine called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which was started by scientists in the mid-1950s. It was just to see if I could get anything published, but then the magazine’s publisher called me to ask if I would be the editor of the magazine. That’s how I entered this world.
Several years later, that publisher got a new president who was going to shut down the magazine. So, I got the original founders back together and in 1995 we all left to start a new magazine named the Annals of Improbable Research, which continued to organise the Ig Nobels. I am still the editor.
Why did you create the Ig Nobels?
Suddenly finding myself the editor of a science magazine, I called lots of folks for advice – including scientists and journalists. In that way, I met lots of researchers and inventors who were doing very unusual things, many of which were funny. It hit me that nobody was ever going to know that most of these people ever existed and did this fascinating work – this seemed wrong. I felt that someone should create some kind of awards ceremony to celebrate them. That’s how the Ig Nobel prizes started.
How are the winners selected?
I coordinate the Ig Nobel board of governors, which has about 100 members that include scientists – a few of whom have actual Nobel prizes – as well as teachers, students and journalists. They are spread around the world and participate in virtual meetings regularly, as well as periodic in-person meetings in the Boston area. I did a rough count one year and there were about 9000 new nominations for Ig Nobels. That was a pretty typical year.
We can give prizes to people who are no longer living, so long as somebody is alive who knew them well and can accept the prize on their behalf. Both last year and the year before, we had prizes for research that had been done around 1940. The children of the winners were in their 90s and came and accepted the prizes.
Has anyone declined to accept an Ig Nobel prize?
When we choose a winner, we offer the prize to them quietly. If they don’t want it that is fine and we never tell anybody. Only about 10% or fewer decline the award, and it’s almost always because they are at the beginning of their career. Typically, they have a supervisor or a boss who is problematic and things are not easy. They just need to quietly get through this period of their life and move on. Occasionally we have tracked them down years later to offer them the prize again and they have accepted.
Is there a more serious point to the awards?
In many places, and especially in the US, science is being attacked attacked in very fraudulent ways and for fraudulent purposes by people who now have control of the government. They’re sending the message that science isn’t really discovering the way the universe works and is just something that greedy people use as an excuse to make decisions. So, I think anything that even in small ways is getting people interested in science is extremely helpful. A lot of people have told us that the Ig Nobel prizes made them really curious about science for the first time.
How will the upcoming awards ceremony differ from previous ones?
This year, it is moving to Zurich, Switzerland and the theme is fungi. Several universities in the ETH Domain, the University of Zurich, and other Swiss science organisations are collaborating with us to produce the awards ceremony. At least in the foreseeable future, it will alternate between Switzerland and a different country around the world.
Four of the 10 winners decided not to come because they didn’t feel comfortable entering the US
Previously, the Ig Nobels ceremony had always taken place at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Boston University. The winners have always been very much international and almost all of them would travel to Massachusetts. Last year things were very different when four of the 10 winners decided not to come because they didn’t feel comfortable entering the US as a foreigner. We asked those four winners to send the text of their acceptance speeches, and at the ceremony each speech was read aloud by a different Nobel prize winner.
What is your favourite Ig Nobel awarded?
The Ig Nobel prize in biology in 2003 went to Dutch ornithologist Kees Moeliker of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam in the Netherlands. As the museum’s curator, Moeliker had witnessed a very unexpected incident involving two ducks that was later described in a paper he published in 2001 at the insistence of his friends. The event occurred in June 1995 and is the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck.
A duck had died after loudly crashing into the museum’s new glass walls. When Moeliker heard the noise, he came to look at the scene and saw a second duck fly in, land next to the dead duck and start having sex with it. Moeliker was so stunned and fascinated that he got his notebook and camera, taking pictures and notes over the next 75 minutes. This happens in nature but was way outside anything ornithologists knew about. Nobody knew what to make of it, yet there it is. Moeliker is now the European bureau chief of the Annals of Improbable Research.
What is the future of these prizes?
I am getting older and for a while have been asking lots of people for advice about how we can keep the awards going into the future. We have a lot of much younger, really good organisers in many countries who have been getting involved in the Ig Nobels, many of them are in Europe. They are going to be taking on an increasingly large role over the next 10 or 20 years. I am eager to see what they are going to do, and happy that I will be an increasingly smaller part.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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