All were the subjects of Ig Nobel Prize-winning studies (ooh, Maxine’s going to hate that hyphenation). I attended the Ig Nobel roadshow at Imperial College last night, hosted by the awards’ straight-faced founder Marc Abrahams. Over two hours, ten prize-winners presented their improbable research to an audience of captivated grinagogs.
Ig Nobel prizes, famously, are awarded for research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. And so it proved. Star of the show was Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker, whose seminal paper The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos bagged him the prize for Biology in 2003. After recounting the fateful day in 1995 when he made his key observation, Moeliker unleashed increasingly lewd examples of animal deviancy, all delivered in a disarming dead-pan tone more reminiscent of Royston Vasey than Rotterdam.
The famously defiled duck even made an appearance, when Moeliker withdrew its stuffed carcass from a Harrods carrier bag for the audience to inspect.
UCL’s Chris McManus – a well-known author on the subject of handidness – won the 2002 Medicine prize, and made the cover of Nature for his paper Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture. “Would you describe your work as sinister?”, asked one audience member. “No, I’d say it is perfectly even handed,” requipped McManus.
Indeed, the audience were as ebullient and eccentric as the speakers. After the first talk by Charles Spence of Oxford, on the sonic properties of crisps, an elderly audience member, adopting the most academic and serious tones, objected to Professor Spence’s award on the grounds of precedence. A similar study, he claimed, had been performed on the accoustic attributes of cornflakes a few years before.
It’s not very often that BMJ authors find themselves in the same sentence as the words ‘spectacular finale’. One exception is Dan Meyer who co-authored the cutting edge paper Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects earning him the 2007 Medicine prize. Dan is himself a keen swallower of swords and gave a live demo. With help from nervous audience members, he sunk several blades into his alimentary sheath.
His greatest feat of death defiance was to get a stranger to retrieve a sword from its oesophagal scabbard using an Indiana Jones-style bull whip.
Best night out in ages. I can’t beat Anna Kushnir, who got to go to the actual ceremony in Boston last October, but these roadshows are the best free tickets in town. You can check out the full schedule here.