Eau d' Cowlogne

By Robert W. Payne

06/15/2009

(Fall 2007):

A tradition here at LaRiviere, Grubman & Payne is our report on the annual winners of the “IgNoble Awards.” These awards are whimsically given out annually to researchers and inventors whose work has no business being undertaken in the first place. The awards are presented by real-life Nobel laureates at Harvard.

Among the 2007 winners on October 4 were some stellar contributions:

• The Chemistry award was yielded to a Japanese researcher, who developed a method to extract a “vanilla fragrance and flavor” from cow dung. (Now available in finer department stores – Elizabeth Taylor’s eau d’ cowlogne.)

• An Argentinan team pole vaulted to the top in the category of Aviation by writing a paper on their administration of Viagra to globetrotting hamsters, all in the cause of Science, to overcome jet lag. (“Doctor, I’m traveling to New York next week on a red eye and have a very important meeting first thing in the morning.” “Well, then of course you’ll want to take some Viagra right after landing. Just one thing: better carry a large briefcase.”)

• Our own US Air Force’s Wright Laboratory for instigating chemical weapons research into a “gay bomb.” The press release says the Peace prize was earned by this effort to make enemy troops “irresistible” to each other. I am not making this up.

• My personal favorite however is for Linguistics. Researchers in Barcelona published a paper demonstrating that laboratory rats were unable to differentiate between a person speaking Japanese backwards and one speaking Dutch backwards. Well, duh. Talk about a rigged, meaningless experiment. If the rodents couldn’t distinguish pig Latin from pidgin English, then I’d be impressed with the data.

Other awards in Medicine went for a probing study on the health consequences of sword swallowing – finding, not too startlingly, that sword swallowers don’t fare well if suddenly surprised by a loud noise. Biology went to Dr. Bronswijk for taking a census of mites, spiders and fungi that share our beds. (Talk about too much information.) In Physics, a joint US-Chilean team investigated how sheets become wrinkled.

I know that last one sounds a bit trivial, but you do realize sheets wrinkle in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere, don’t you?