The Ig Nobel Awards Since 1991
My Personal Favorites
Not many people are aware of the Ig Nobel Awards, a satirical ceremony based on the Nobel Prize Awards. You can read more about it here. I have compiled a list of my own personal fa1991 - CHEMISTRY - Jacques Beneviste - for his persistent discovery that water is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all traces of those events have vanished.
1992 - ART - Jim Knowlton - for his anatomy poster titled "Penises of the Animal Kingdom", and to the US National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging him to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.
1993 - MATHEMATICS - Robert W. Faid - for calculating the exact odds (860,609,175,188,282,100 to 1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist.
1994 - BIOLOGY - W. Brian Sweeny, Brian Krate-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton and Wayne Hansen - for their breakthrough study "The Constipated Servicemen: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops", and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency.
1995 - NUTRITION - John Martinez - for Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, derived of coffee beans that are ingested and excreted by the Luak (a bob-cat like animal) native to Indonesia.
1996 - PUBLIC HEALTH - Ellen Kleist and Harold Moi - for their cautionary medical report, "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll".
1997 - MEDICINE - Carl J. Charnetski, Francis X. Brennan Jr., and James F. Harrison - for their discovery that listening to Muzak stimulates immunity system production and thus may help prevent the common cold.
1998 - BIOLOGY - Peter Fong - for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac.
1999 - MANAGED HEALTH CARE - George and Charlotte Blonsky - for inventing a device (US Patent 3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth - the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.
2000 - COMPUTER SCIENCE - Chris Niswander - for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your keyboard.