Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Practitioners of what some might call ‘real-world’ science carried off
most of the 1992 Ig Nobel prizes, awarded by the Journal of Irreproducible
Results and the MIT Museum for achievements which ‘cannot or should not
be reproduced’.

The ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week
also celebrated the peacekeeping achievements of Daryl Gates, Los Angeles
police chief during this year’s riots. Gates was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace
Prize ‘for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together’.

Ivette Bassa, ‘constructor of colourful colloids’, accepted the chemistry
prize for ‘the crowning achievement of 20th-century chemistry, the synthesis
of bright blue Jell-O’. General Foods sent her to the ceremony in a corporate
jet, along with a team of jelly chemists, dressed in lab coats dyed blue
for the occasion. Blue jelly was served along with the traditional champagne
at a reception after the ceremony.

Presumably less happy to be recognised was fertility specialist Cecil
Jacobson, who received the biology prize for using his own sperm in artificial
insemination instead of sperm from anonymous donors. Jacobson was cited
for devising ‘a simple, single-handed method of quality control’ for sperm
banks. Earlier this year he was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud.

The literature prize recognised exceptional scientific fertility of
a different kind – publication of 948 scientific papers between 1981 and
1990 by Yury Struchkov of the Institute for Organoelemental Compounds in
Moscow – one every 3.9 days.

The judges again bypassed a pair of Ig Nobel favourites, cold fusion
pioneers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. However, they created a new
archaeology prize to recognise the historically diligent environmental cleanup
efforts of ‘claireurs de France, a French youth group whose name means ‘those
who show the way’. The group won fame earlier this year for cleaning ancient
graffiti from the walls of the Mayrieres cave near the French village of
Bruniquel – erasing priceless cave paintings in the process.