Not Really Vanilla?

8 October 2007



Ig-Nobel Prizes Announced for 2007

Last Thursday, Harvard’s Sanders Theater hosted the 2007 Ig-Nobel Prizes awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research. The prize in medicine went to Dr Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer for “Sword Swallowing and its Side Effects.” Glenda Browne won for Literature for her study on the problems the word “the” causes when alphabetizing [Editor’s note: it’s very simple: if it’s the first word, ignore it. If not, it’s treated like a regular word]. And of course, there was an award for the woman who figured out how to extract vanilla flavoring from cow dung.

This journal’s favorites are:

  • “Linguistics” -- Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona -- for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
  • “Biology” -- Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for their census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi that live in beds human occupy.
  • “Peace Prize” -- The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called “gay bomb,” that “will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.” [Don’t ask, don’t tell]
Yet, the best of all was the prize in chemistry that went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan. She developed a way to extract vanillin, or vanilla fragrance and flavoring, from cow dung. As the Boston Globe reported, “UMass’s Craig Mello, last year's Nobel winner in medicine, was the first to dip his spoon into his dish as the crowd chanted ‘Eat it!’” One might have preferred a sorbet.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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