Titans of Science: Marc Abrahams
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…
In this episode
00:58 - Marc Abrahams: Making science funny
Marc Abrahams: Making science funny
Marc Abrahams
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 - Marc Abrahams was born on the 17th of January, 1956. He attended Swampscott High School and then read Applied Mathematics at Harvard. So what was the early day science? People are notorious in your position for blowing things up or kitchen table chemistry, that kind of thing. Were you one of those?
Marc - I never fell in love with blowing things up. Never had anything against it, but never really did a whole lot myself. And in school, I had a few teachers who were both really good teachers and really loved science. And one of them was also very, very funny. And she would play records of songs by a guy named Tom Lehrer. He was a mathematician who wrote and performed funny songs. And some of them were about science, some of them were about politics. They were about all kinds of things, and they were also kind of grimly funny, sharply grimly funny in a lot of ways. And growing up around that I think just encouraged whatever was within me.
Chris - Well, it's clearly served you well because you are now the editor and co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research. You're also the originator and the master of ceremonies of the annual Ig Nobel Prize celebration. That's how you and I first got to know each other. I mean, it had been going for a while before I got involved for the first time, but I've just been a huge fan ever since. And for those not in the know, and Marc would tell us more later, it's a satirical take on the Nobel Prize, isn't it, Marc? But that gala is broadcast on public radio every single year and throughout your career. Your motto has been 'laugh, then think'. It's making people think about things, having made them laugh first. It's something we've shamelessly stolen here on the Naked Scientists, I hasten to add. You started the Ig Nobels in 1991. I was 16. I was doing my GCSEs at the time, so I was about to go down the scientific career track, but that was unusual for that period. People weren't communicating science very much at all at that period in the 1990s. It was in a bit of a low point, wasn't it? And so for you to come out the blocks and do something that was both funny, but also shone the spotlight on important bits of science that did make people think, but then engage with the subject, that was very forward thinking,
Marc - You can look at it that way. That's kind of the way I grew up. And looking back, that's the way my favourite teacher and, and also my father and just people I liked were about, especially with science. The things that I really liked about science as a kid, and then later in college studying it sort of for real. And later doing it, sort of for real, the things that I always liked the best were when there was something that I didn't understand. I felt really stupid. I don't understand what this thing is. And then somebody would describe it in a different way or I would come at it from a different direction. And very suddenly there was something that was kind of crazy about it and funny and I understood it. And part of what made it funny was I didn't understand this a minute ago, and now it's really simple. I was looking at it like it was some horribly complicated thing, and it's so simple. And so these surprises were things that I came to crave and I still do. And I hope that lots of other people do too. That when you're learning anything, a lot of the time, I think for pretty much anybody, a lot of the times when you suddenly make sense of something. It's at a moment when you just see it in a different way or you see something that seems completely crazy and it makes you laugh and you relax and suddenly you're seeing the thing in a much clearer way, you understand it. So that's what the Ig Nobels are really about. I mean, it started in 1991 was the first ceremony. I just sort of by accident become the editor of a science magazine. Before that, I was doing software stuff on various kinds of things.
05:02 - Marc Abrahams: How the Ig Nobel Prize was founded
Marc Abrahams: How the Ig Nobel Prize was founded
Marc Abrahams
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 - How does a Harvard mathematician turn into the person who conceives of, launches, and hosts the Ig Nobel Prizes? You've gone via software development. So what were you doing?
Marc - Since I was a little kid, I liked writing stories and writing about anything and writing about science and just, I liked writing stuff, trying to explain stuff to myself or to anybody else and, and trying to make it funny because I just like that. And I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had shown only to friends. So about 1990, I started to wonder what would happen if I took something that I wrote some of this stuff piling up. What would happen if I tried to get it published somewhere? Because I've never tried. So I sent it off to a magazine. I didn't even know where to send it, so I asked around and somebody pointed me toward a magazine that they said was probably long dead, a thing called the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which I'd never seen. I found an address. So I mailed off some stuff I wrote and a few weeks later got a phone call from a man who said, 'hello, I'm the publisher of the journal. I got your articles. Would you be the editor of the journal?' So that was how I started being in the world of writing about science and learning more about science so I could try to explain it to other people and try to make it funny. And during the first few months of that, I was suddenly meeting lots of scientists, lots of people who had invented things, lots of people who'd done odd things that were hard to describe. And I kept thinking, you know, some of these people should really be famous. The world should come to appreciate them for some because they did great things. Some because they did really horrible things, but they're all kind of funny and thought provoking. And most of these people are going to live their whole lives and they'll die and almost nobody will know what they did. And that's wrong. Somebody should do something. And then I thought, well hey, you know, I'm the editor of a magazine, <laugh>, it's a little magazine, but we can do something. And so we started the prizes.
Chris - Did you go after the possible sources? Did you use your instincts and say, right, I'm going to go and find some things that would work?
Marc - Well by then, these were the kinds of things that I was already collecting and other people were sending to me for the magazine. So I had a big source of this stuff already. And that was starting to become kind of popular. So lots of people were sending things in.
Chris - Just for the avoidance of doubt. These are real scientific studies.
Marc - Oh yeah. When we started that very first year, we didn't quite know what we were doing. Mostly did. We gave 10 prizes. That seemed like a good number. And two or three of them were fictional because I kind of thought a mix would be very interesting. But it became immediately clear at the ceremony that first year that it was a real thing, that's funny. Next to an invented thing that's also really funny. The invented thing is going to die of shame. It cannot compete. The reality is what makes the thing really funny and really gets you to think about it. And we're trying to describe each of these things we give a prize to in a way that anybody in the world could hear a one sentence description about this. And they will immediately understand the story and start laughing. Not because we twisted it, just because we told the story really clearly.
08:35 - Marc Abrahams: The best Ig Nobel Prizes
Marc Abrahams: The best Ig Nobel Prizes
Marc Abrahams
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.
20:06 - Marc Abrahams: Being pope of improbable science
Marc Abrahams: Being pope of improbable science
Marc Abrahams
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 - This has won you quite a lot of attention around the world over. I was having a look into your kind of CV and I didn't realize Le Monde, the famous French newspaper, have described you as the pope of improbable science. I mean, that's quite an accolade, Isn't it? The Washington Post says you are the nation's guru of academic grunge and it says here that Harvard Business School has run a case study on you called Marc Abraham's Annals of an improbable entrepreneur. So you are famous on many levels. Do you have a favorite nickname?
Marc - Uh, Marc <laugh>.
Chris - Well, you've gone into podcasting, haven't you? Very much brought this into the next era of broadcast and I suppose information dissemination. So is that basically doing the same thing as the Ig Nobel ceremony or are you talking about different things?
Marc - We're not doing it at the moment. We shut it down for a while because it was a huge amount of work on top of the huge amount of work. That started about 10 years ago when one of the big radio networks here, CBS Radio, called up one day and said they wanted to get into the business of podcasting. And so they were looking for a bunch of people who did unusual things to start up a podcast. So the first couple of years we were doing it as part of CBS Radio and then CBS Radio in a <laugh> classic modern business story, suddenly decided to blow itself up. So that disappeared. And I'll tell you a story about something else because it grew out of another thing we'd already started doing as live events. The other thing is something we call 'dramatic improbable readings,' or 'improbable dramatic readings,' I can never quite remember which title we use. And that was and is to take some of the scientific reports that are piled up here, the things people send us, some of which have gone on to win Ig Nobel Prizes, many of which we've written about in my magazine, in the Annals of Improbable Research. And most scientific reports in the world are written in a language that almost nobody would want to understand or could understand. They're written for tiny, tiny, very specialised audiences, and they're written in language that's sometimes intentionally difficult to understand, but should be impressive. However, amidst all the thousands of those, there are some reports that are written very differently, and there are even some reports that are written in a difficult way that have passages in the middle of them that are just beautiful, that if you only saw this chunk of words, you could easily believe that this was written by a great playwright to be done on the stage, or somebody who writes movie scripts or somebody writes for TV or somebody who writes novels. And one day, as an experiment, I invited a bunch of people to come to the public library here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The head of the library offered to let me use their auditorium, and I brought a pile of these scientific reports and we had a whole bunch of different people here from many different backgrounds who all seemed to like to perform one way or another. So I asked each of them to just look through this pile of reports, just pick one of them that interests you a little bit. And pick out exactly two minutes worth of words and you will be an actor. Pretend these words were written as a script and it was working really well. And then I learned something. Often you learn really valuable things because you were very wrong. And this was a case of that I had one rule for all the performers and for the audience, which is that no matter how interesting you and the audience find this, we're not going to allow any questions because each of the people reading one of these reports to you, they don't know any more about what they're saying than you do. They only saw this 15 minutes ago, so it would be crazy to ask them questions. You're not allowed to ask questions. But everybody wanted to ask questions. <laugh>, after each performer would do their two minute dramatic reading, the hands would fly up. People wanted questions. So I bowed to public demand here and said, okay, you can ask questions of each of the readers, but here's the rule in the audience. Ask any question you want a dramatic reader to answer however you want with this one rule, no bullshitting. It's okay to say you don't know something, and it's okay to speculate as long as you make it clear that you're speculating. We've done many events of these dramatic readings and they always work out really well, and the questions and answers are always the best part. The thing that I thought should have been prohibited, turned out to be always the best part. And in the podcast, each time I would get a scientist or sometimes more than one, to do this same thing, I would give them one of these reports on something way outside their professional competence and ask them, pick out a few words here, a few little passages here, and do a dramatic reading. And I'm going to interrupt you and ask you questions about that, and we'll talk about that. And that's what the podcast is. So we're not talking about the knowledge that's in these things. It's really more about the questions. And so the discussions, because these are all really smart people, we have really fun discussions about how could, if you wanted to know how to do this thing, how would you even begin and how would you, how could you possibly assure yourself that doing this experiment this way would tell you anything at all? That it's not just insane or foolish. That's what the podcast is about.
Chris - What does Mrs. Abrahams make of what you get up to?
Marc - <Laugh> Fortunately, she likes this stuff. She's very funny and very smart. And she herself has a PhD in psychology. She also has a background as an actor and a comedian, and she is very supportive of this stuff. We met, in fact, because of the Ig Nobel Prizes a lot of years ago, <laugh> in the early years of the Igs. Because we don't, the Igs, and the magazine really don't have any money. We depend entirely on volunteers. So we'd put out a notice one year that we're organising this year's Ig Nobel ceremony. We could use a few more volunteers who have a good theatrical background. And Robin, now my wife, was at a point in grad school where she had a little breathing room and she wanted to get back to doing some theater things and to meet some people. And so she volunteered and we hit it off. And then she very quickly said, 'you know, look, you're going to have to make a decision. You can either have a really great assistant for the show or you can have a girlfriend, but you can't have both in me.' And she's been really great.
Chris - And then you do get both, because inevitably I bet she does. I bet your house is full of these manuscripts, isn't it? I mean, if my house has anything to go by, it's probably got quite a prodigious amount of this stuff. All, every surface. That's my guess.
Marc - It used to be like that, but now almost all of it is sitting on a hard disc <laugh> and many backups of hard discs. So yeah, a tremendous amount of material, but it's all in digital form or most of it.
Chris - Well, it's been a real pleasure to have the pope of the improbable talk to me for the last half hour or so.
Marc - Bless you.
Chris - Thank you. Thank you for conferring that upon me. And I suppose we all should acknowledge you being the nation's guru of grunge, academic grunge.
Marc - Chris, there's something I should say to you too, speaking as the pope
Chris - Go on.
Marc - The people who are going to be hearing this over the Christmas season and in the Northern Hemisphere, it's probably pretty cold. And even though I know you like being a Naked Scientist, this is the time of year to bundle up a little, isn't it?
Chris - Well, I head down south and solve the problem that way, but yeah, you're right. It's not the season. It is the season to be jolly, not the season to be naked.
Marc - Yeah, however, you know, in short bursts, why not?
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