Serious – and not so serious – research

The Nobel Prize in Medicine. A serious award about serious science. Nobel laureates have made a significant, lasting, and important contribution to our understanding of the scientific world, work that has dramatically changed what we know about how our world works and how we conduct research. For example:

In 2006, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello were awarded the Nobel for the discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA. This is an experimental technique used by thousands of scientists today.

In 2002, Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston won the prize for the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. We now understand that cells have dedicated mechanisms not only to keep themselves alive, but also to kill themselves when necessary.

In 1999, Gunter Blobel received his Nobel prize for learning that proteins have intrinsic properties that dictate their movement and final place within a cell. This property forms the basis of a huge field of current biological research – protein trafficking.

And in 1993, Richard Roberts and Phillip Sharp were given the Nobel for discovering split genes. It had previously been thought that genes were always one long, continuous unit. Drs. Roberts and Sharp clarified that genes are often broken into multiple sections, which get cut and pasted back together in a process called splicing. This presented a dramatic shift in the understanding of how genes are regulated.


Yes, the Nobel prizes are inspiring and dramatic. They are the serious side of research. But there is also a less-than-serious award about less-than-serious science, which I personally find highly entertaining. An award ceremony held every year celebrates the not-so-inspiring research, the research that doesn’t really change our world, but (quite often) the research that makes us laugh – and hopefully remember why we love science. They’re called the Ig Nobels.

The Ig Nobels are awarded by an organization called Improbable Research. Their stated goal: “The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.” To give you an idea of the kinds of research that are awarded Ig Nobels, here are a few examples of the winners for 2007. (Remember, this research is all actual research, published in real, peer-reviewed scientific journals.)

In Medicine: Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer – Sword swallowing and its side effects. Based on: “Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects” published in the British Medical Journal

In Physics: L. Mahadevan and Enrique Cerda Villablanca - How sheets become wrinkled. Based on: “Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension” published in Nature

In Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto – Extracting vanilla from cow dung. Based on: “Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction”, internally published in the International Medical Center of Japan

In Linguistics: Juan Manuel Toro and Nuria Sebastian-Galles – Rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards. Based on: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology


In fact, if you look back at all the Ig Nobels awarded over the last 10 years, you’ll find a variety of topics that will probably make you sit up and say – “someone studied that?!?” This includes the attraction of mosquitoes to limburger cheese, how herrings communicate with flatulence, calculating the surface area of an elephant, the levitation of frogs with magnets, helping make clams happier by giving them Prozac, and whether humans can swim faster in water or syrup. Wow. Now that’s some funny science!

My personal favorite, though, has to be the 2004 award for psychology. It was awarded to Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else.

Dr. Simons and Dr. Chabris made a video of a group of 6 people tossing a basketball amongst themselves. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the circle of people. The video was shown to test subjects, who were told to count the number of times the basketball changed hands. After they watched the video, they were asked about what else they saw besides the basketball. And here’s what’s really funny. An astonishingly large percent of the test subjects did not notice the person in the gorilla suit. They were so focused on the task at hand – counting the passes of the ball – that they completely failed to see a six-foot tall person walking around in a gorilla suit. Now that’s what I call focus!

Now, the Ig Nobels may seem silly and inane. But I think that they serve a very important function. Science is serious. It’s significant. It can be intense. But science is also supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to intrigue and excite people. It’s supposed to make you think about things you never knew before. It’s supposed to stimulate your imagination. And what better way to make science fun than to show people a video with someone walking around in a gorilla suit!

By the way, if you want to watch the basketball and gorilla video yourself, go to: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html
Click on the link “View the “basketball” video." I hope it makes you laugh!