Just stumbled across a big box of press clippings from the 90s. Here’s Bill Lipscomb with the plaster cast of his left foot on display. This article in the Harvard Gazette on October 2, 1997, says: IG NOBEL FEET: William N. Lipscomb, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1976, holds his foot up against a display […]
Tom Steitz has died; his obituary is in New York Times. He was half of a marriage of two great and celebrated chemists, who met while they were grad students of the great and celebrated Professor Lipscomb, whom many of you saw and met at two decades of Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies. (We met at a memorial […]
Peaco Todd’s special duty at recent Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies was to accompany Nobel laureate William Lipscomb. Peaco has written some thoughts triggered by Bill’s recent death at the age of 91. (She and Professor Lipscomb are pictured here on the cover of the special Professor Lipscomb issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.) Her essay, which appears on […]
Bijan Pakzad, winner of the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry, has died. Bijan (as both he and his company were best known) was awarded the prize for creating DNA Cologne and DNA Perfume, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle. The Persian Independent reports: Born […]
Another Bill Lipscomb moment, from the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, as reported by the Harvard Gazette: Ig Nobel festivities traditionally include the Heisenberg Certainty Lectures. These 30-second lectures are named in honor of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s infamous “uncertainty principle,” which states that it is impossible to accurately measure both the position and momentum of […]
Amanda Yarnell writes, at C&Ntral Science: Best Party Favor Ever Party favors are best when they are edible, I’ve always thought. So I was disappointed when I sat down to dinner at Bill Lipscomb’s 90th birthday party last night to find a tiny, not-chocolate-coated book next to my plate. Then I took a closer look. […]