October 4, 1999
Harvard Humor Magazine Bestows
Ig Nobel Prizes for 'Achievements'
By SUSAN GANLEY
Harvard University's science-humor magazine, the Annals
of Improbable
Research, last week awarded its ninth annual Ig Nobel
Prizes, a spoof on
the Nobel Prizes.
Genuine Nobel laureates were present at the ceremony in
Cambridge, Mass.,
to bestow prizes upon 11 people and 3 institutions for
achievements that
"cannot and should not be reproduced" in areas including
biology,
chemistry, environmental protection, literature, managed
health care,
medicine, peace, physics, and science education.
A list of the winners:
The late George B. and Charlotte E. Blonsky, of New York
City and San Jose,
Cal., were awarded the managed-health-care prize for
inventing a device to
aid women in childbirth. A woman is strapped onto a circular
table, and the
table is then rotated at high speed.
Paul Bosland, of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico
State University,
in Las Cruces, received the prize in biology for breeding
a spiceless
jalapeño.
Len Fisher, of Bath, England, and Sydney, Australia, also
received the
physics prize for calculating the optimal way to dunk
a biscuit.
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong, of Johannesburg, South
Africa, received the
peace prize for inventing an automobile burglar alarm
consisting of a
detection circuit and a flamethrower.
Hyuk-ho Kwon, of the Kolon Company, in Seoul, South Korea,
received the
environmental-protection prize for inventing a self-perfuming
business suit.
Takeshi Makino, president of the Safety Detective Agency,
in Osaka, Japan,
received the prize in chemistry for his role in developing
S-Check, an
infidelity-detection spray that a wife can apply to her
husband's underwear.
Steve Penfold, of York University, in Toronto, received
the prize in
sociology for his doctoral dissertation on the sociology
of Canadian
doughnut shops.
Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck, of the University of East Anglia,
in Norwich,
England, received the physics prize for calculating how
to make a teapot
spout that doesn't drip.
Arvid Vatle, of Stord, Norway, received the prize in medicine
for
collecting and classifying which kinds of containers
his patients chose
when submitting urine samples.
The British Standards Institution, a non-profit standards
and
quality-services organization based in London, received
the prize in
literature for its six-page specification of the proper
way to make a cup
of tea.
The Kansas Board of Education, in Topeka, and the Colorado
State Board of
Education, in Denver, received the science-education
prize for mandating
that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of
evolution any more
than they should believe in Newton's theory of gravitation,
Faraday's and
Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory
that germs cause
disease.