Notorious fruit bat research wins ‘Ig Nobel’ prize
AN ACADEMIC paper about oral sex among fruit bats — which sparked a sexual harassment claim between two academics at an Irish university — has won an alternative scientific award.
Earlier this year, British scientist Dr Dylan Evans was disciplined by University College Cork (UCC), which upheld an allegation of sexual harassment made by one of his colleagues in the School of Medicine.
Dr Rosanna Salerno Kennedy complained to UCC’s authorities after Dr Evans (43) had shown her an article in an academic journal entitled ‘Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time’.
UCC upheld one of her two complaints against Dr Evans and ordered him to undergo a two-year period of “monitoring and appraisal” and to complete special training….
BONUS: Two students at Dr. Evans’s university have conflated the news of the Ig Nobel Prize (which was awarded to the authors of the fruit bat paper) with the Evans controversy (in which Dr. Evans is accused of reading that paper, and of then showing it to a colleague). In the Cork Student News, one student wrote a column headlined “Fruit bat lecturer wins alternative science prize for ‘improbable’ research“. A fellow student wrote a column under the headline “‘IG Nobel’ prize won’t do Dylan Evans any favours“. Can you spot the holes in those two Cork Student News stories?
UPDATE TO THE BONUS: The Cork Student News eventually corrected both columns.
