Harvard’s Ig Nobel prizes for really serious research
Oct 6th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Right here at the beginning, I wish to express my sincere thanks to that perhaps not quite Nobel but definitely noble British “public corporation” known throughout the world as the British Broadcasting Corporation, alias BBC, affectionately referred to on its home turf (which Shakespeare in King Richard II proclaimed “This precious stone set in the silver sea”) as simply The Beeb.
Two Anglophone FM radio transmitters here within Berlin’s city limits add importantly to this marvellous city’s overall “quality of life”, to borrow a term from sociology: the Beeb (90.2) and National Public Radio (104.1). The Beeb also maintains a sometimes absolutely riveting website, to which I most gratefully owe this morning’s bloggery – for me personally an introduction to the annual Ig Nobel awards domiciled at the Ivy League’s prime sprig: Cambridge, Massachusetts’ hallowed Harvard University.
Since this morning’s BBC news bulletin about these supreme awards in ten disciplines exemplifies British humo[u]r’s inimitable admixture of lambent wit and extra-dryness, let me merely whet your appetite with the one of the total of ten prizes (for research in Aviation, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Linguistics, Literature, Medicine, Nutrition, Peace, and Physics) the Beeb evidently regards as the most noteworthy, since it singles this one out for its lead paragraph, videlicet:
“Pioneering research into a ‘gay bomb’ that makes enemy troops ‘sexually irresistible’ to one another has scooped one of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes.”
Rather than merely paraphrase, let me admit you to the Beeb’s own presentation by enabling you simply to click here.
