The 1994 Ig Nobel Prizewinners
On October 6, the winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes were honored, in a fashion, by three Nobel Laureates, 1200 hecklers, the Norwegian Consul, and a rat control scientist at a tumultuous ceremony at MIT. The Prizes honor individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." Five additional Nobel Laureates (Sidney Altman, David Baltimore, Nicolas Bloembergen, Jerome Friedman, and Philip Sharp) participated in the Ceremony with congratulatory tapes and slides.
This was the fourth annual ceremony. Past winners include Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who won the 1992 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for "his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together."
The festivities included speeches by three of the new winners -- Dr. Brian Sweeney (Biology), Dr. Robert Lopez (Entomology) and, via tape recording, Dr. Richard Dart (Medicine). Sweeney and Lopez had their Prizes -- cheap gold-painted wax half-brains -- personally handed to them by the Nobel Laureates.
The Nobel Laureates -- Richard Roberts (Physiology or Medicine, 1993), Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry, 1986), and William Lipscomb (Chemistry, 1976) also each presented a 30-second "Heisenberg Certainty Lecture." Heisenberg Lectures were also presented by: Harvard Chemist Cynthia Friend; the father of artificial intelligence, MIT's Marvin Minsky; astonomer Margaret Geller of Harvard; and neurophysiology pioneer Jerome Lettvin of MIT. Those Heisenberg Certainty lecturers who exceeded the time limit were thrown from the stage by a referee.
The Nobel Laureates also joined with a five-woman dance group to perform a brief ballet number, "The Interpretive Dance of the Electrons," with music from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite."
Following is a list of the new Ig Nobellians:
BIOLOGY W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton, and Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, "The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops," and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency. [The study was published in "Military Medicine," vol. 158, August, 1993, pages 346-348.]
PEACE John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C. [Details were published in "Interim Report: Results of the National Demonstration Project To Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness in Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993," Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa.]
MEDICINE This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes. Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation." [The report was published in "Annals of Emergency Medicine," vol. 20, no. 6, June 1991, pp. 659-661.]
ENTOMOLOGY Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear, and carefully observing and analyzing the results. [Dr. Lopez's report was published in "The Journal of the American Veterinary Society," vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-607.]
PSYCHOLOGY Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.
PHYSICS The Japanese Meterological Agency, for its seven-year study of whether earthquakes are caused by catfish wiggling their tails.
LITERATURE L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book, "Dianetics," which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.
CHEMISTRY Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.
ECONOMICS Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb: "to davilar," meaning, "to botch things up royally."
MATHEMATICIANS The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.
Full details of the 1994 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, including photographs and highlights of the acceptance speeches and 30- second Heisenberg Certainty Lectures, will be presented in December in the first print issue of The Annals of Improbable Research.
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In the September issue of Trends, I mention an editorial by Troyen A. Brennan called "Buying Editorials" and published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Again in the July/August issue of Lingua Franca (pp. 11-13) there is a note by Paul McCarthy called "Harlot Ghosts" dealing with a similar subject. McCarthy summarizes a December 1993 editorial in The Lancet describing how a British publisher solicited John Swales of the University of Leicester to pose as the author of a review article on the effects of calcium on vascular tissue, which would be ghostwritten by representatives of Bayer U.K.
Aside from the fact that Brennan was asked to put his name on a bogus editorial and Swales on a review article, there are a couple of interesting differences in the cases. First, this kind of dishonesty pays better in the U.S.: Brennan was offered $2,500, but Swales was offered only 500 pounds (about $750). More significant is the American lack of shame. Whereas Bayer U.K. first denied the incident, and then claimed it was the result of an inexperienced and overzealous editor, the public relations firm that solicited from Brennan has ublicly defended the practice.
Single copies of Poynter Center monographs are available for $2 each. Make your check out to the Poynter Center and send your order to: Poynter Center, Indiana University, 410 North Park Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405. We also hope to publish Rosemary Chalk's keynote address in the near future.
APPE members -- particularly those who are or know junior faculty doing research and education on issues of practical and professional ethics in science, engineering and technology -- will be interested in a new Foundation-wide NSF program called the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. This program will give successful eligible applicants three-year awards that would help to support research and educational activities.
To get the CAREER program guidelines, which contain the particular requirements to apply, send an e-mail message requesting NSF publication number 94-101 (New) to pubs@nsf.gov. Or get the grants office at your institution to order it. You will also need the NSF Grant Proposal Guide, 94-2, which contains the forms and general NSF requirements.
Persons applying for CAREER awards for research and education activities in practical and professional ethics in science, engineering or technology should also contact Deidre Burton, 703-306-1743 or dburton@nsf.gov, for the latest version of the EVS guidelines. To discuss proposal ideas, you can call Rachelle Hollander, Ethics and Values Studies, NSF 703-306-1743, or send her a brief e- mail message via Internet at rholland@nsf.gov.
U.S. universities awarded more doctorates in science and engineering last year than ever before. A third of them went to foreign students.These figures come from an annual survey released by the National Research Council, conducted for the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies.Of the nearly 40,000 Ph.D.s awarded in 1993, about 25,000 went to students in science and engineering. That is about 5,000 more than five years ago. In 1993, foreign students earned about 8,000, or 32 percent, of the doctorates in those fields.
[The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 1994, p. A19]
The large number of science and engineering degrees being awarded by U.S. universities to foreign students should give pause to everyone who blithely assumes that all of their science students share the same culture and the same values.
The first excerpt is entitled "Writing Research Papers: Publishing Without Perishing." The second and third excerpts are on how to succeed in a job interview and how to obtain funding.
The book might be useful in teaching the kind of survival-skills course described by Michael Zigmond at the 1994 workshop. It is not clear from the excerpts in The Scientist whether the book pays any attention to ethics.
As was mentioned in a previous issue of Trends, if you don't subscribe to The Scientist, you can get it online.
Last updated: 22 January 1996
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Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University