After 35 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes for funny research are leaving the United States. This year, they will be awarded in Switzerland so that all winners can attend, the organisation has announced.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded for research that first makes you smile and then makes you think. Dutch researchers often win these prizes.
Biologist Kees Moeliker, for example, won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for his article on necrophilia in ducks. He is now involved in the organisation. “The ceremony stands or falls with the presence of the winners,” Moeliker told De Volkskrant. “And last year we noticed that four of the ten winners dropped out. America is no longer a pleasant country to visit, if only because of the hassle with visas.”
The Trump administration has launched an attack on academic freedom. And anyone who expresses criticism of the US on social media may not be granted a visa. So this year’s ceremony will take place in Zurich on 3 September. Three weeks later, there will still be a meeting in Boston, according to the website.
Highly regarded in the scientific world
The Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded in the run-up to the Nobel Prizes. They are highly regarded in the scientific world. Nobel Prize winners are always involved in the award ceremony.
One winner of an Ig Nobel Prize later went on to win the ‘real’ Nobel Prize. In 2000, Dutch (now British) physicist Andre Geim received an Ig Nobel Prize for levitating a frog in a magnetic field. Ten years later, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics – not for the levitating frog, but for the invention of graphene. (HOP, BB)
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