CNRS, France’s venerable research organization, takes a cheery look at some of the many French scientists who have won Ig Nobel Prizes. Here are portions of the CNRS report [machine-translated into English]:
Ig-Nobel: science seriously
“ This is the prize I always wanted! ” says Daniel Bonn, a CNRS research director currently on secondment at the University of Amsterdam. This prize is an Ig-Nobel, a play on words between the Nobel Prize and the word “ignoble”….
Daniel Bonn, who, having shown that one cannot drown in quicksand and having perfected the recipe for the perfect sand for making castles, “should have had it sooner “, was rewarded for having separated sober and drunk worms by chromatography . “This is really serious research,” he warns: “We were doing things that we thought were important and that were funny at the same time.”
These worms represent so-called “active” polymers – that is, self-propelled and capable of collective behavior. Their low cost and ease of maintenance make it possible to have many objects to study, and their large size allows them to be observed directly, unlike more conventional polymers. By reversibly adding alcohol to them, scientists reduce their activity level to simulate materials at very low temperatures (without thermal agitation or activity). They then demonstrate that chromatography – a technique consisting of passing a mixture through a sort of labyrinth – is an effective technique for separating active polymers according to their activity level: a discovery that could be useful to anyone studying these materials.
However, Daniel Bonn has difficulty finding funding for this research, which is considered too original in the Netherlands. Having worked as much in France as in the kingdom of tulips, he appreciates the human and financial resources available for research in the second country but recognizes that “the complete freedom favored by the status of CNRS researcher allows for a creativity that is not found anywhere else ” and that he has tried to import with this particular experience….
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This media exposure also marks the memories of Marie-Christine Cadiergues. The teacher-researcher was awarded the Ig-Nobel Prize in 2008, for an article from her thesis defended in 2000 – the year of the Sydney Olympic Games, in Australia. A detail that is important: the article showed that fleas living on dogs are able to jump better, both in height and length, than their cousins living on cats. “At the time, I had posted a little cartoon on my office door that represented the Flea Olympics!”, remembers the scientist, already well aware of the comical nature of her work. But this research also has implications, particularly in terms of contamination between dogs and measures to combat the diseases that these fleas can carry.
Fifteen years ago, the Ig Nobel Prizes were perhaps less well-known than they are today, but Marie-Christine Cadiergues still spent “at least a month and a half ” responding to journalists by email, by phone, on the radio – “it was non-stop!” In 2010, she also took part in the “Ig Nobel tours”, organised almost every year in Europe. It was an opportunity to talk about the research that had been rewarded in English, Swiss or Nordic universities, during conferences similar to the big award ceremony organised each year at Harvard or MIT. A way of attracting the public to science through humour…. Since then, the media pressure has subsided, even if the subject regularly comes up in the fall, when the prize is announced. “An older colleague told me that this little notoriety would last a long time and he was right: the proof is that you contacted me after all these years,” the researcher jokes….
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Marc-Antoine Fardin was already a research fellow at the CNRS when he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in physics in 2017 for an article published three years earlier in the Rheology Bulletin . The man who now works on the mechanics of cell tissues, particularly in relation to healing, answered a crucial question: are cats liquid or solid? With his long-term position, he never hesitated to add it to his activity reports for the CNRS.” During evaluations by Hceres , my laboratory mentions the Ig Nobel, in the same way as other scientific prizes, ” assures the researcher. “Knowing certain French teams who had received it and were doing very good science, I had a high regard for it. So, when I got it, it was a real surprise but I was delighted, ” he adds….
While winning the Ig Nobel Prize has “ opened doors for him from a communications perspective” – he is regularly invited to speak on the subject in various formats to more or less specialist audiences – Marc-Antoine Fardin does not think that the prize has changed his way of working. And for good reason: “ The fact of having written the winning article already demonstrated a certain way of doing research! ”
A Good Natured Counterpart
Several weeks earlier, Nature magazine interviewed a bunch of past Ig Nobel Prize winners about how receiving the prize has affected them.