Russian science journalist Dmitry Borisov wrote a comprehensive, good history of the Ig Nobel Prizes, in the publication N+1. It’s written in the Russian language. Here, below, is a machine-translation into English.
(Note: the original, Russian version includes additional graphics).
Shameful prestige
How the Ig Nobel Prize Became a Status Award
by Dmitri Borisov
On September 12, 2024, the Ig Nobel Prize was awarded for the 34th time in Massachusetts. After the pandemic restrictions, this was the first ceremony to be held in person, not just online. This year, the organizers suggested “laughing first, then thinking” about the problems of medicine, animal physiology, and everyday bureaucracy — a fairly traditional set of quite relevant scientific and pseudo-scientific questions for the award. You can read about the laureates’ works in the article “Drunken Worms, a Scared Cow, and a Dead Trout . ”
When this prize was created more than 30 years ago by one particular person who liked strange research and experiments, it was treated as a competition for the city’s crazy people. Today, most scientists would consider it an honor to receive this award. We tell you how the prize turned from a private entertainment into a global phenomenon and whether this evolution has benefited modern science.
Beginning of touring activities
In 1991, American mathematician and programmer Marc Abrahams became the editor of the humorous Journal of Irreproducible Results . The journal, founded in 1955 by virologist Alexander Cohn and physicist Harry Lipkin, had recently changed owners – they needed someone who could search for suitable works. Abrahams, who had been collecting strange scientific research and experiments for many years, seemed like a suitable candidate to revive the journal. As the mathematician himself later said , he had to do this alone, without any marketing or promotion. And with almost no budget.
One of the tools for promoting the magazine was supposed to be the Ig Nobel Prize, which he organized a few months after taking office. Initially, it was perceived by scientists as an anti-prize, if not a competition for the city’s crazy people. Abrahams himself said that he was constantly written to by “discoverers” and “inventors” who were sure that they deserved the Nobel – and he primarily focused on such people.
In 1992, Abrahams was called an “upstart” by American geologist and writer David Kopaska-Merkel in a short remark for Science magazine without mentioning his name. It is possible that such attacks, among other things, forced him to reconsider the concept a little – Abrahams wanted the award to be taken more seriously, and its name to lose its mocking connotations (the word ignoble , to which the name of the award refers, can be translated as shameful or vulgar ). One way or another, already in the second year of the award’s existence, it began to be given for real scientific research. This launched a kind of re-branding of Ig Nobel: the initially almost offensive name became more and more ironic, and the award itself – more and more prestigious.
Mark Abrahams was the editor of the Journal of Irreproducible Results for about four years, until the magazine changed owners again, with whom he could not work together. The idea arose to buy the publication, but in response to this, the price tag was set at a million dollars. As a result, the former editor, who by that time had his own team, launched a new journal in 1994 – Annals of Improbable Research . The Ig Nobel Prize began to serve his needs.
It was precisely during this period that a shift in attitudes toward the prize became noticeable. On the one hand, Robert May, the British government’s scientific adviser, was still appealing to the “Ig Nobel Committee” in 1995 to leave the British alone, since their “Ig Nobelization” allegedly discredited serious research by British scientists. But at the same time, since that same 1995, “Ig Nobelists” began to participate in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – with a special event called “Incredible Research”, where they talked about their achievements.
A couple of years later, the “Ig Nobel tours” began : the laureates, individually or in groups, toured cities and countries. Since 2003, they began to participate in the mandatory program of the British National Science Week , since 2004 they became regular guests at scientific events in Australia, since 2007 – in Italy, since 2009 – in Scandinavia, Austria and the Netherlands. Since the same 2009, the laureates began to be invited to the Cambridge Science Festival. Needless to say, such performances were desirable for the Ig Nobelists themselves: the scientists received additional attention precisely as serious researchers, and often at the international level.
Each year, the geography of such tours and the number of countries of origin of the award winners expanded.
The location of the award ceremony spoke of the serious intentions of its organizers: since 1991, the award ceremony has been held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since 1994, for a long time at Harvard, and after the Covid break, it returned to MIT). Later, the status became noticeable by other signs. Nobel laureates began to participate in the ceremony, and one of them, Andre Geim, appeared in the ranks of Ig Nobelists. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on graphene together with Konstantin Novoselov in 2010, but ten years before that, in 2000, there was an Ig Nobel Prize, which Geim received together with British theoretical physicist Michael Berry for experiments with a levitating frog : the amphibian was made to hang in the air using an electromagnet.
Now this doesn’t look like the second-rate competition it might have seemed in the early 1990s. It is a prestigious and even respected prize in the scientific community, albeit with an obvious hint of strangeness.
From preprint to product
The transition to the current status was not instantaneous. This is evident, for example, from the number of conscientious scientists with methodically verified research receiving the award: their number is constantly growing.
In 1991, of the seven laureates, only three were “real scientists,” and even then, among them was, for example, the odious French immunologist Jacques Benveniste , who believed that
(read more about this “discovery” and other popular myths about water in the article “Living and Nonliving” ). Most of the first laureates were not scientists. The prize was awarded to Swiss writer and film director Erich von Däniken, who studied the influence of aliens on the fate of humanity , and to economist Michael Milken for inventing “junk bonds” (high-yield, but with a low investment rating or no rating at all). Another prize went to US Vice President Dan Quayle for “proving that you need to learn.” The politician was known for his tongue-tied statements: “If we don’t succeed, we risk losing” or “Frankly, teachers are the only profession that teaches our children.”
But already in 1995, nine scientists were awarded in ten nominations, and only two “non-scientists”. These were French President Jacques Chirac (for testing atomic bombs in the Pacific Ocean in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and large tobacco companies, whose representatives unanimously defended the position in the US Congress that nicotine is not addictive.
In 2000, there were ten nominations
, and in 2003 — 26, in particular, the researchers of the brain of London taxi drivers Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues from University College London. It is believed that their work contributed to the development of neuroscience. But at the same time, in 2003, the prize was also received by an employee of the real estate agency Karl Schwarzler together with the Prince of Liechtenstein Hans Adam II — for the opportunity to rent the entire country of 160 square kilometers for 70 thousand dollars per day (for weddings, conferences or other events — even corporate parties).
Another decade later, in 2014, the prize was shared by 33 scientists in nine nominations and one National Institute of Statistics of the Italian government (ISTAT). Its employees proposed to include in official economic reports income from prostitution, drug trafficking, tobacco and alcohol smuggling. In subsequent years, there were no more than one or two prizes per year for non-scientists. For example, in 2020, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was given to the governments of India and Pakistan – for obliging their diplomats ring each other’s doors at night and run away.
Both before and now, the award could be received not only by serious scientists, but also by unserious ones. Or by non-scientists at all. But if in the early stages of the award’s existence, preference was given to those who could be laughed at, now the balance has shifted towards thinking.
Another telling narrative: every year, the number of Ig Nobel Prizes awarded based on dissertations and scientific articles from the Scopus database is growing .
There is no noticeable trend in the prestige of scientific publications in which laureates have been published since 2011, but there are still quite a few articles in serious journals. Although in some years, articles in more serious periodicals clearly predominate. In 2020, for example, the works of Ig Nobel laureates were published in six journals from the first quartile of Scopus, and none from the second.
Loyalty to traditions
Despite the obvious evolution of the award, there are traditions that have remained virtually unchanged over time. For example, giving the award to those whose actions have led to serious undesirable consequences. Thus, in 2016, the award was given to the Volkswagen concern, which carried out a major scam – “dieselgate” . About 11 million diesel cars were equipped with special software. It underestimated the nitrogen oxide levels emitted into the air during testing for compliance with environmental standards by tens of times.
The problems that the Ig Nobel Prize deliberately or accidentally highlights also remain similar. For example, the systemic methodological flaws of modern science. For example, in 1992, the prize was awarded to physicist Yuri Struchkov for his super-productivity . From 1980 to 1990, he published 948 scientific articles: that is, approximately one every four days (read about the established requirement in the scientific community to constantly publish in the article “Graphomania or Death” ). In 1996, American physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal was noted for his famous “hoax” aimed at eliminating weaknesses in the system of selecting articles for publication in scientific journals. He sent a deliberately philosophic text “Breaking Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text. Not recognizing the pseudo-scientific nonsense, the material was published.
In 2001, Australian John Keogh received the Ig Nobel Prize for being the first person in human history to patent a wheel (“a round device for facilitating the transportation of goods and people”). Keogh wanted to demonstrate the imperfection of the patenting system, which was oversimplified in Australia at the time. For example, the novelty of an invention was checked only by the inventor himself.
But these traditions and the Ig Nobel Committee’s constant attention to social, medical and systemic methodological problems paradoxically work for its evolution. The more complexities are highlighted, even in a humorous way, the more serious the attitude towards the prize as a whole becomes.
Patents for Ig Nobel Prize winners’ inventions and developments based on their seemingly absurd ideas work in exactly the same way. Their number only increases year after year, and with the growth of their applied importance, the attitude towards the prize changes. Here are four illustrative examples.
Bypassing the tabloids
Interest in the inventions of those awarded has long been a stable trend – more and more devices are based on the ideas that received the Ig Nobel Prize. And this interest is not only among scientists and developers.
In 2022, the Ig Nobel Prize itself became a laureate — the Heinz Oberhammer Prize for excellence in science communication. The reasoning is simple: popular presentation and abbreviated format allow non-specialists to grasp the essence of scientific research and engineering developments, and humor generates additional attention to science and technology.
The prize has also become a mediator within the scientific community. Scientists from distant fields are given the opportunity to quickly learn about what their colleagues are doing. Otherwise, they would either not be aware of their work at all, or would learn about it from the tabloids, and most likely in a distorted form.
The Ig Nobel Prize is unlikely to ever replace or even displace traditional scientific awards, and its impact on the development of science will likely remain a subject of debate for a long time. However, the award has already become an important element of modern scientific culture, stimulating the popularization of knowledge and an unconventional approach to research.
Abrahams’ project has been pushing scientists beyond the established canons for decades, breaking down, at least partially, the barriers between science and the general public. Both have the opportunity to laugh first, and then think. Whatever that means.