Marc Abrahams: A science award that makes you laugh, then think

174,841 views ・ 2014-10-24

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George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were
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a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City,
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invented something.
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They got a patent in 1965 for what they call,
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"a device to assist women in giving birth."
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This device consists of a large, round table
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and some machinery.
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When the woman is ready to deliver her child,
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she lies on her back,
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she is strapped down to the table,
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and the table is rotated at high speed.
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The child comes flying out
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through centrifugal force.
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If you look at their patent carefully,
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especially if you have any engineering background or talent,
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you may decide that you see
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one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter)
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Doctor Ivan Schwab in California
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is one of the people, one of the main people,
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who helped answer the question,
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"Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?"
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And it turns out the answer to that
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is because their brains
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are packaged inside their skulls
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in a way different from the way
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our brains, we being human beings,
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true, have our brains packaged.
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They, the woodpeckers, typically
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will peck, they will bang their head
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on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day!
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And as far as anyone knows,
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that doesn't bother them in the slightest.
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How does this happen?
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Their brain does not slosh around like ours does.
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Their brain is packed in very tightly,
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at least for blows coming right from the front.
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Not too many people paid attention
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to this research until the last few years
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when, in this country especially,
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people are becoming curious about
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what happens to the brains of football players
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who bang their heads repeatedly.
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And the woodpecker maybe relates to that.
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There was a paper published
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in the medical journal The Lancet
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in England a few years ago called
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" A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years."
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Dr. Caroline Mills and her team
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received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it.
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The man had cut his finger,
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he worked processing chickens,
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and then he started to smell really, really bad.
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So bad that when he got in a room
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with the doctors and the nurses,
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they couldn't stand being in the room with him.
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It was intolerable.
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They tried every drug,
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every other treatment they could think of.
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After a year, he still smelled putrid.
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After two years, still smelled putrid.
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Three years, four years, still smelled putrid.
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After five years, it went away on its own.
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It's a mystery.
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In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin
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and her team tested an old tradition in her city.
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They live in a city that has huge hills,
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San Francisco-grade hills.
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And in the winter there, it gets very cold
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and very icy.
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There are lots of injuries.
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The tradition that they tested,
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they tested by asking people
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who were on their way to work in the morning,
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to stop and try something out.
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Try one of two conditions.
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The tradition is that in the winter,
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in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots.
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And what they discovered by experiment,
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and it was quite graphic when they saw it,
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was that it's true.
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That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside,
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you're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall.
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Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things
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I've just described to you,
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each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter)
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And that's what they got,
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each of them got an Ig Nobel prize.
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In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people,
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started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony.
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Every year we give out 10 prizes.
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The prizes are based on just one criteria. It's very simple.
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It's that you've done something that makes people laugh and then think.
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What you've done makes people laugh and then think.
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their only possible reaction is to laugh.
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And then a week later,
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it's still rattling around in their heads
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and all they want to do is tell their friends about it.
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That's the quality we look for.
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Every year, we get in the neighborhood
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of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize.
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Of those, consistently between 10 percent
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and 20 percent of those nominations
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are people who nominate themselves.
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Those self-nominees almost never win.
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It's very difficult, numerically, to win a prize if you want to.
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Even if you don't want to,
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it's very difficult numerically.
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You should know that when we choose somebody
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to win an Ig Nobel prize,
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We get in touch with that person, very quietly.
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We offer them the chance to decline
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this great honor if they want to.
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Happily for us, almost everyone who's offered a prize
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decides to accept.
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What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize?
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Well, you get several things.
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You get an Ig Nobel prize.
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The design is different every year.
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These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials.
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You're looking at a picture
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of the prize we gave last year, 2013.
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Most prizes in the world also give
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their winners some cash, some money.
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We don't have any money,
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so we can't give them.
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In fact, the winners have to pay their own way
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to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony,
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which most of them do.
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Last year, though, we did manage to scrape up some money.
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Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners
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received from us 10 trillion dollars.
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A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter)
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You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure
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for a few years there of inflation.
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They ended up printing bills
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that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars.
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The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way,
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won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics.
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The other thing you win is an invitation
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to come to the ceremony,
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which happens at Harvard University.
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And when you get there,
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you come to Harvard's biggest meeting place and classroom.
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It fits 1,100 people,
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it's jammed to the gills,
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and up on the stage,
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waiting to shake your hand,
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waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize,
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are a bunch of Nobel prize winners.
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That's the heart of the ceremony.
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The winners are kept secret until that moment,
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even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand
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don't know who they are until they're announced.
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I am going to tell you about just a very few
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of the other medical-related prizes we've given.
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Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes.
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There are lots of these people who walk among you.
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Maybe you have one.
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A paper was published about 30 years ago
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called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts."
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It was written by Dr. Peter Barss,
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who is Canadian.
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Dr. Barss came to the ceremony
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and explained that as a young doctor,
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he wanted to see the world.
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So he went to Papua New Guinea.
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When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious
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what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital.
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He looked through the records, and he discovered
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that a surprisingly large number of people
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in that hospital were there
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because of injuries due to falling coconuts.
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One typical thing that happens is
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people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees,
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down to visit their relatives on the coast,
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where there are lots.
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And they'll think that a coconut tree
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is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down.
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A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall,
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and has coconuts that weigh two pounds
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that can drop off at any time.
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A team of doctors in Europe
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published a series of papers about colonoscopies.
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You're all familiar with colonoscopies,
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one way or another.
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Or in some cases,
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one way and another.
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They, in these papers,
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explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies,
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how to minimize the chance
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that when you perform a colonoscopy,
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your patient will explode. (Laughter)
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Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan
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one of the authors,
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flew in from Paris to the ceremony,
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where he explained the history of this,
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that in the 1950s,
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when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time,
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people were figuring out how to do it well.
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And there were some difficulties at first.
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The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with,
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that you're looking inside a long, narrow, dark place.
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And so, you want to have a larger space.
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You add some gas to inflate it
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so you have room to look around.
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Now, that's added to the gas, the methane gas,
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that's already inside.
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The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen.
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So they added oxygen to methane gas.
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And then they wanted to be able to see,
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they needed light,
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so they'd put in a light source,
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which in the 1950s was very hot.
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So you had methane gas, which is flammable,
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oxygen and heat.
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They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter)
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Now it's rare that patients will explode,
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but it does still happen.
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The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize
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we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar.
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Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere
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that in an emergency
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can be quickly separated
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into a pair of protective face masks.
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One to save your life,
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one to save the life of some lucky bystander. (Laughter)
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Why would someone do this, you might wonder.
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Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony
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and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine.
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She was one of the doctors who treated victims
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of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown.
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And they later discovered that
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a lot of the worst medical problems
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came from the particles people breathed in.
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So she was always thinking after that
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about could there be some simple mask
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that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens.
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Years later, she moved to America.
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She had a baby,
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One day she looked, and on the floor,
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her infant son had picked up her bra,
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and had her bra on his face.
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And that's where the idea came from.
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She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony
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with the first prototype of the bra
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and she demonstrated:
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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["Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate (2008) in economics"]
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["Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel laureate (2001) in physics"]
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I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter)
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It's my favorite bra,
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but I would be happy to share it with any of you,
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should the need arise.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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