Diego Golombek, who shared the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Aviation, spoke of it toward the end of an interview this week (the lengthy interview was, until that point, about much weightier subjects — the headline is “Science in the eye of the storm: Diego Golombek and the defense of reason in a world of fake news“) in the Uruguayan newspaper El Pais:
EL PAIS: Another funny piece of research is the one that won you the Ig Nobel Prize on Viagra and jet lag . Could you explain it?
GOLOMBEK: One of the big questions in the lab at the time was: how do you set your biological clock? The biological clock is a little piece of the brain that measures time and tells your body what time it is. But it needs to be adjusted, otherwise it goes fast or slow. And light is key in this process. The question was what does light tell your biological clock, what does it activate, what does it deactivate, what genes does it modulate? We found a molecular pathway through which light adjusts the biological clock. So we thought: if we modify that pathway, will the clock synchronize better and faster? It turns out there is a drug that does exactly that: Sildenafil, the basis of Viagra. One night in the lab, when we were working with hamsters, we said: “It’s obvious, we have to give them Viagra and see if the clock synchronizes faster.” A doctoral thesis came out, it was published in PNAS , a very prestigious journal, and we discovered that Viagra improves adaptation to jet lag in hamsters. People thought it was funny. We were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize, which rewards research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. We went to Harvard to receive it, and it was wonderful: an extraordinary ceremony, full of real Nobel Prize winners who came to laugh at themselves and at science. It’s very healthy to show that.