Ig Nobel Prize

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony opens with a speech of just two words: "welcome, welcome." Nothing about the evening grows more solemn from there. The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award, given out every year since 1991, and it borrows the name and the shape of the most famous honor in science. Then it turns that honor sideways. Who dreamed it up, and what exactly does it reward? How do you run a ceremony where speeches are timed and the trophy is cheap and fragile? And why would serious researchers, even Nobel laureates, agree to take part?

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• 2. A Fictional Cousin

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  In 1991, Marc Abrahams launched the Ig Nobels while he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. He later co-founded the Annals of Improbable Research, the scientific humor magazine that now organizes the prizes. Abrahams has been master of ceremonies at every one of them.

  The name comes from Ignatius Nobel, an invented character described as the inventor of the soda pop. He is also supposedly a distant cousin of Alfred Nobel, who founded the real Nobel Prize. The name is a pun too, since it echoes the word ignoble.

  The earliest prizes were given for discoveries "that cannot or should not be reproduced." That wording shows how mischievous the project was from the start.

  The first year also stood apart in a stranger way. Three of its prizes went to scientists who did not exist: Josiah S. Carberry, Paul DeFanti, and Thomas Kyle, credited with discovering Administratium.

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• 3. Who Wins and Why

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  Every year the Ig Nobel board of governors receives more than 9,000 nominations. Roughly 10-20% of them are self-nominations. From that pile, the board picks winners for ten prizes.

  The categories change from year to year. Physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics, and peace often appear, borrowed from the real Nobel list. Fields such as engineering, mathematics, neuroscience, and veterinary medicine turn up only occasionally. A prize can also be awarded posthumously.

  After that first year, the prizes recognize genuine achievements. Most go to real research with an unorthodox, obvious, or humorous slant. The stated goal is to honor work that "first make people laugh, and then make them think."

  Abrahams says the audience he has in mind is people who "think it's scary, or impossible to understand, or just plain boring." Humor is the way in for them.

  Some prizes carry a sharper edge. In 2020, the medical education prize went to several world leaders who had been criticized for understating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers of pseudoscience, such as homeopathy, have also been honored.

  Winners are contacted before the public announcement so that they can decline. Few of them do.

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• 4. A Disposable Trophy

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  The prizes are handed over by Nobel laureates, which gives the silliness a deliberately serious frame. What the winners receive, though, is made of cheap materials that are prone to disintegrate.

  The money is a joke with a real object attached. Each winner gets a single banknote worth 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. In US currency that comes to about four cents.

  The banknote has an odd twist. As a collector's item, it is worth more than its face value in real money.

  A winner who wants a prize that lasts must therefore look to the note rather than the trophy. Receiving it is only half the challenge, because every winner then faces the stage clock.

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• 5. Ceremony Rituals

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  The ceremony takes place each September, a few weeks before the real Nobel winners are announced. After the two-word welcome, the winners step up for their 60-second acceptance speeches.

  Enforcing that limit falls to an eight-year-old girl nicknamed Miss Sweetie Poo. If a speaker rambles, she says, over and over, "Please stop. I'm bored."

  There is also a format called the "24/7" lecture. Winners first summarize their research in 24 seconds, then again in seven words.

  Paper airplanes are thrown onto the stage as a long-standing tradition. Professor Roy J. Glauber served as the official "Keeper of the Broom" and swept the stage clean until his death in 2018. He missed the 2005 ceremony because he was in Stockholm to claim a genuine Nobel Prize in Physics.

  Every ceremony includes a contest in which audience members can win a date with a Nobel laureate. Each year also brings one unique event. In 1997, a team from the Institute for Cryogenic Sex Research handed out a pamphlet titled "Safe Sex at Four Kelvin." The 2000 ceremony staged a debate to find the most intelligent person, with two contestants speaking at the same time for 30 seconds.

  The evening traditionally ends with the line: "If you didn't win a prize, and especially if you did, better luck next year!"

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• 6. Changing Venues

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  The first ceremonies took place in a lecture hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1995, the event moved to the Sanders Theater at Harvard University. Three student groups co-sponsor it: the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

  The COVID-19 pandemic forced a bigger change. From 2020 to 2023, the ceremony was held fully online. It returned to MIT in September 2024.

  In March 2026, the Annals of Improbable Research announced another move. The 2026 ceremony would be held on the 3rd of September in Zurich, Switzerland, hosted by the University of Zurich and ETH Domain.

  Abrahams explained the decision by saying that the United States had become "unsafe" for guests. It was the first time the prize had left the Boston area.

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• 7. Critics and Converts

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  Not every scientist welcomed the prize. Robert May, then the chief scientific adviser for the UK, asked that British scientists be excluded. He worried that an Ig Nobel could harm their career prospects.

  Attitudes softened as the prize became better known. The scientific community has grown more appreciative, and some winning research has gained extra attention because of the award.

  At the 2025 ceremony, Tomoki Kojima, one of the biology winners, said the award "serves as motivation for us to continue striving for excellence." A prize once feared as a career risk was now being described as encouragement.

  A 2009 article in The National went further and argued that the prize deserves more respect than its name suggests.

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• 8. Silly Science Pays Off

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  The National ran its piece in September 2009 under the headline "A noble side to Ig Nobels." It conceded that the prize often goes to research on "trivial" questions. History, it argued, shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs.

  A clear example came in 2006, when the biology prize went to a study of mosquitoes that can carry malaria. The insects proved equally attracted to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet. Traps baited with the cheese have since been used against the malaria epidemic in Africa.

  The most famous case belongs to Andre Geim. In 2000, he shared the physics Ig Nobel with Michael Berry for levitating a frog with magnets. Geim won the real Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for his work on the electromagnetic properties of graphene. He was later knighted. As of 2026, he is the only person to have received both honors.

  The frog experiment has had a further afterlife. By 2022, it was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility.

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