Nutty reports earn the Ig Nobel Prize

It's safe to say that when Peter Barss began investigating the deadly hazards posed by Cocos nucifera, the tropical coconut palm, he wasn't expecting to win a Nobel Prize for his work.

And he didn't. But nearly 20 years after The Journal of Trauma published "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts," Barss did take home an unexpected, career-defining accolade for his study: an Ig Nobel Prize. The media have been hounding him ever since. "I've never had so much attention in my life," he marveled in his office at United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain.

Such are the strange powers of the Ig Nobel. Since mathematician Marc Abrahams conceived of an award honoring scientific achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced," the Ig Nobel has become almost as well-known as the prize it is meant to spoof.

Today, Abrahams, 47, will again serve as master of ceremonies for the awards, held each October at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre. He also has a new book out on the prizes and the stories of their more-unusual recipients.

Abrahams last week said he is feeling a tad triskaidekaphobic — this being the 13th Ig Nobel ceremony and all. And if that weren't worrisome enough, the guest of honor is Edward Murphy III, the son of the man who coined Murphy's Law.

"What can go wrong probably will," Abrahams said with a hint of hopeful mischief in his voice.

Ten Ig Nobel recipients are chosen each year by Abrahams and the Ig Nobel Board of Governors, a group of scientists and journalists who sift through about 5,000 nominations. It's not easy, he said: "There are so many good ones."

French President Jacques Chirac has won for "commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic-bomb tests in the Pacific." So has a team of British scientists for the report "Courtship behavior of ostriches toward humans under farming conditions in Britain." And we won't even get into the levitating-frog study.

So eager are some scientists to own the prize that they have crafted experiments with Ig Nobel judges in mind. So far, the only researchers who have been successful are the Norwegian authors of the 1994 British Medical Journal study titled "Effect of ale, garlic and soured cream on the appetite of leeches."

But not everyone has embraced the Ig Nobel. The awards ceremony was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until, Abrahams said, a "dyspeptic" MIT administrator complained in 1994.

A year later, Sir Robert May, former chief science adviser to the British government, demanded that Abrahams and his committee stop awarding Ig Nobels to British scientists. The reason: Three of his countrymen accepted the 1995 Physics Prize for a study of soggy breakfast cereal.

Abrahams ignored May, who one British scientific journal called a "pompous killjoy." The following year, Robert Matthews, a computer scientist at the University of Aston in Birmingham, accepted the Ig Nobel for his investigation of why tumbling toast always lands butter-side down.

Abrahams says he's careful to ask scientists if they want the prize before they are awarded. Few turn it down, he says.

But for some Ig Nobel laureates, life after the prize can be a letdown — as mechanical engineer David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts has discovered.

"It's a little sad that my more serious research will never get the amount of attention that this fun stuff did," said the man who helped solve the mystery of why shower curtains billow inward.

While much of the science honored by the Ig Nobel may seem silly, Abrahams said it often didn't start out that way. In fact, he has refined his definition of the ideal Ig. "First, it makes you laugh," he said, "then it makes you think."