This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded with proper pomp Oct. 8, 4 days after a much different ceremony took place at Harvard University to honour the 2001 Ig Nobel laureates. In Sweden, Leland Hartwell, Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse were honoured by the Nobel Assembly for their discoveries surrounding the “key regulators of the cell cycle.” At Harvard, Peter Barss of McGill University received the 2001 Ig Nobel in medicine for his “impactful” 1984 report on “injuries due to falling coconuts,” published in the Journal of Trauma.
The Ig Nobel “ceremony” offers awards in the same categories as the Nobels. This year's Ig Nobel for Literature went to John Richards of England, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society “for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.” In physics, David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts took the Ig Nobel because of “his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.” Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado, took the prize in biology for inventing Under-Ease — airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape. A CMAJ article that had been nominated for the Ig Nobel in Medicine, “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne,” failed to take the prize.
This year's Ig Nobels, which attracted 1200 spectators, also featured 24/7 seminars in which famous scientists explained their field of research, first in 24 seconds and then in 7 words. Another highlight was a wedding of 2 geologists, which took 60 seconds and was preceded by a mini-opera performed by 5 Nobel laureates. Dr. Dudley Herschbach, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986, was the prize in the annual Win-a-Date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest.