Marc Abrahams: The best Ig Nobel Prizes

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith chats with co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research, and the master of ceremonies for the Ig Nobel prize, Marc Abrahams…

Chris - Go on then, share with me some of the gems. I've got some in mind that I've heard you talk about. In fact, the first time I ever heard about your work was when you were in Cambridge at the science festival. That's Cambridge, UK not Massachusetts. So I know some of them, but tell us what your favourite ones are that you've covered over the years.

Marc - Oh, I have too many. I'd rather do this the other way. Tell me some of them that caught your eye.

Chris - Well, I can hear your voice in my head from 2007, which is when you came to the Cambridge University Science Festival, and you said about digital rectal massage as an acute treatment for intractable hiccups and everyone laughed. And then you said, does anyone have hiccups? And again, the place erupted, but that was when you captured me.

Marc - <laugh> Did you have hiccups?

Chris - No. No, not from that moment on. I've never had hiccups again, the thought of that Marc.

Marc - And here we see the power of science or something. Yeah. This was a medical report, in fact two medical reports done in different parts of the world by unrelated people. I think the second report may have been people who saw the first one. The first one was a doctor named Francis Fesmire. He published a short report in a medical journal. He was describing the malady of a patient he was trying to treat who had hiccups that went on and on and on for days and wouldn't stop this kind of horrible hiccups that go on for days. You know, it's funny to other people, but it's a horror to the person who has it. There didn't seem to be any reliable treatment for that. There were a lot of guesses. So he went with one of the guesses and he tried digital rectal massage and he said it worked. And so he wrote it up and he came to the ceremony and he quite proudly put on a rubber glove and raised one finger <laugh>. And the crowd, you know, cheered him wildly.

Chris - And not a hiccup in the house, presumably.

Marc - Not that I'm aware of. No. <laugh>.

Chris - I think I've interviewed some of the people who you've conferred awards on. Was there one, a young doctor who was studying speed bumps and appendicitis? Did she not end up in the running at some point for one?

Marc - She and I think three colleagues interviewed people who were brought to a hospital because they had a pain that might be appendicitis. And what they found out was that when the ambulance would go over a bump in the road, the response of that person, of that potential patient, whether they screamed or not <laugh>, would seem to be a pretty reliable indicator of how serious their condition was.

Chris - She actually published that in the Christmas British Medical Journal, which, again, I think did they follow you or was it sort of convergent evolution? Because they also, around Christmas time, will publish studies that are serious bits of science, but they're done tongue in cheek and with a bit of a laugh in mind, aren't they?

Marc - It's best to remember, they have a long tradition of doing that at Christmas time. Several of those things have won Ig Nobel Prizes later. And one of the editors of the BMJ told me that one of the articles that BMJ published and that we gave an Ig Nobel Prize to. I can remember the big grin on her face when she was telling me, it was this sort of a 'Marc sit down because I need to explain this to you because you have no way of knowing this.' This was a report done by four people in the Netherlands. It was the first time that anyone had arranged for a man and a woman to have sexual intercourse inside an MRI tube. And to take images of that.

Chris - I think they reported, I read that paper. I think they said that it was thanks to Viagra, that it would just not have been possible in the unromantic setting of an MRI scanner to have sex, until the era of Viagra.

Marc - Yes, there were a lot of details in that report. And there were some <laugh>, some images. And anyway, this editor told me that that got a lot of attention when the BMJ published it. But she said a few months or a year later, whenever it was, when an Ig Nobel Prize went, things went through the roof there. And she said that ever since the day that Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, that article, beginning that day, has been the most read article in the entire history of the BMJ. And she said, and that has continued week after week, month after month, year after year. And she said the difference in numbers of people reading that article online compared to any other article in the history of the BMJ was so large that the people who run the BMJ had had to teach themselves whenever they met to plan anything, based on what's the history of the website and what do we want to happen in the future, they would have to teach themself to ignore any numbers connected with that article.

Chris - Well, you know what they say, sex always sells. That's why we are called the Naked Scientists. When I first started the Naked Scientists website, I reckon about 90% of the visitors were coming for the key word naked. So as one person said, they're definitely not preaching to the converted. But have you, though, had any contact with the proper Nobel Prize people? Because I know they're quite sensitive about the names, aren't they? And I know you are Ig Nobel, which is different from the Nobel Prize, but we were talking to Brian Schmidt on the Titans of Science earlier in the summer. He got the Nobel Prize for discovering how much the universe is expanding and the concept of dark energy, et cetera. And he's got a vineyard in Australia. And I said to him, well, why don't you do what D'arenburg, the vineyard in Australia, did. They had a wine called the Noble Prankster where you could have Nobel Prankster. And he said, they've already been onto me and said, they're very, very strict about the copyright around the name. But he said, I have offered to make them some wine for the next ceremony. But he said they need to pay to ship it from Australia up there. But have they been onto you about this, and any interactions?

Marc - From before the beginning, we wanted to make sure that we never caused trouble for people. And so we, at the very beginning, we tried very hard to make sure we would never, ever, ever do anything that would cause any kind of worry or problem for them. And from the very beginning, we had a bunch of people involved with organising the first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony who themselves had Nobel Prizes. So they had many discussions with us about this. And they all were saying that this shouldn't cause any problem. You know, probably they will ignore it over in Sweden, and if not they'll be amused by it. But then, we were always very, very careful from the start to just do anything we can to not cause problems. And part of the Ig Nobel ceremony every year from the beginning has been that the prizes at our ceremony are handed out to the Ig Nobel Prize winners by Nobel Prize winners. And the idea of that now almost seems normal. But when we started this, that seemed beyond crazy, which was why we did it. It seemed so completely absurd that nobody could possibly, we hoped, think that this is trying to steal the thunder of the Nobel Prizes or anything. This is just absurdity, you know, times a million. And as time went on, those people handing out the prizes would go back to Stockholm to be in meetings or be part of future Nobel Prize ceremonies. And they would come back and call me up and say, you know, I had a discussion with some of the people who run the Nobel Foundation about this. And they seemed to be more or less amused. So we all took this as good news. Good. We're not causing any problems for them. And then they started to be helpful, the Nobel people, in bits and pieces over the years. We weren't ever asking them for anything. But when we started getting invited to do Ig Nobel events in Sweden, the events were like the ones you saw in Cambridge, where we would have a bunch of people who'd won Ig Nobel Prizes and me, and we all talk and show pictures and take questions that some of the Nobel people would come to those and clearly were amused and kind of happy to be there. And, one year even, I got an email or phone call, I forget which, from the assistant to the head of the Nobel Foundation, he said he's going to be visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts where you live in a couple of weeks. And I thought it would be interesting to get together. So we got together, I took him and the assistant out to ice cream, the best ice cream place in town, and we had a very fun talk, you know, not about anything serious. So ever since then we've continued to try to do our basic thing, which is just not cause any trouble for anybody.

Chris - That is good to hear. I think one of the other things we probably should mention is because people who are not familiar with the approach you take, where in many sorts of science discourses and things, people are given enormous amounts of time to expand and expound on a subject. You right from the get-go are saying, 'no, this is all about brevity and making sure people get stuff across really, really quickly.' I think that was very farsighted because we now recognise in this era that people's attention span has telescoped into about three minutes. And you've been saying for a long time, we need to make sure things are conveyed very, very word efficiently with very, very little time. But you had a crafty trick for doing it. You had a Miss Tweety Pie or whatever it was on the stage, who would say shut up I'm bored. I think more conferences need that.

Marc - We have lots of tricks. Yeah. The thing that you mentioned is probably our best invention. We call it Miss Sweetie Poo. In the early years of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, we didn't really have any firm limits on the winners giving their acceptance speech or on most of the other things. And one year the ceremony was really long, the audience didn't seem to mind. But I can remember standing at the back of the stage with some of the other organisers toward the end of this feeling, at any moment they're going to turn on us. They're going to realise how long this has gone. We've got to do something for next year. So the problem here is if you've invited somebody to go to a lot of trouble to come to your event and make a speech, how do you get them to stop? How do you do it without appearing impolite, without offending them, without looking like you're an ogre of some kind? And in talking it over, we somehow came up with the idea that, you know, a little kid has a power that an adult does not have. And that led with some refinements to Miss Sweetie Poo, the 8-year-old child who tells people after about one minute to 'please stop. I'm bored.' And that works.

Chris - I'm absolutely sure, Marc, no one is saying that right now, though.