October 1, 1999
[transcript of broadcast report]
IG NOBEL REVIEW
By Bruce Sylvester
Western civilization oohed, aahed, gasped, and giggled
at Sanders
Theatre last night at the ninth first annual Ig Nobel
awards ceremony for
scientific achievements that could notóor should
notóbe duplicated.
Produced by the Annals of Improbable Research along
with the
Harvard Computer Society and Harvard-Radcliffe Science
Fiction
Association, this yearís theme was heredity, so,
in honor of the Kansas
and Colorado state education boards' counter-evolutionary
edicts, there
was a subtheme of Wizard of Oz. After all, this
isnít Kansas.
Of course, there were the cherished traditions of the
Ig Nobels:
such ig-nitaries as the king and queen of Swedish meatballs,
paintings
from the Museum of Bad Art, Sister Christine of BC High
to lead us in
moments of science, the win a date with a Nobel laureate
contest, the
beach balls and paper airplanes sailing around the theater.
One paper
airplane landed on the microphone amid an Ig Nobel acceptance
speech.
An issue the Ig Nobels always face is winners who
cannot -- or will
not -- appear to accept their awards. This year
quite a few showed up: the
guy who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the sociology
of Canadian
donut shops; the British Standards Institution for its
six-page
specification on how to make a cup of tea; the Norwegian
doctor who
researched the types of containers his patients chose
for urine samples.
Mr. Takeshi Makino, president of the Safety Detection
Agency in Osaka,
Japan, proudly accepted the Ig Nobel in chemistry for
his involvement
with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives
can apply to their
husbands' underpants to find semen stains. Please
don't tell Hillary
about it.
MIT women might have been particularly interested in a
babe
scientist's brief analysis of whether careers in science
and technology
make babes look nerdy. Tomorrow at MIT the
Ig Nobels conclude with a
series of lectures.
And remember, as Ig Nobel creator Marc Abrahams told
the crowd,
if you didnít win an Ig Nobel this yearóand
even more so, if you
did -- better luck next year.
This is Bruce Sylvester for WMBR.