Ig Nobel Prize Winners

ig Noble Awards Home Page - http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-top.html

2000

PSYCHOLOGY
David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kreuger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." (Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.)

LITERATURE
Jasmuheen (formerly known as Ellen Greve) of Australia, first lady of Breatharianism, for her book "Living on Light," which explains that although some people do eat food, they don't ever really need to.

BIOLOGY
Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University, for his first-hand report, "On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica." (Published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.)

PHYSICS
Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University (UK), for using magnets to levitate a frog and a sumo wrestler. (REFERENCE: "Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons" by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.)

CHEMISTRY
Donatella Marazziti, Alessandra Rossi, and Giovanni B. Cassano of the University of Pisa, and Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of California (San Diego), for their discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. (REFERENCE: "Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love," Marazziti D, Akiskal HS, Rossi A, Cassano GB, Psychological Medicine, 1999 May;29(3):741-5.)

ECONOMICS
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.

MEDICINE
Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal." (Published in British Medical Journal, vol. 319, 1999, pp 1596-1600.)

COMPUTER SCIENCE
Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard.

PEACE
The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout "Bang!"

PUBLIC HEALTH
Jonathan Wyatt, Gordon McNaughton, and William Tullet of Glasgow, for their alarming report, "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow." (Published in the Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 38, 1993, p. 185.)

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1999

SOCIOLOGY
Steve Penfold, of York University in Toronto, for doing his PhD thesis on the sociology of Canadian donut shops.

PHYSICS
Dr. Len Fisher of Bath, England and Sydney, Australia for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit.
...and... Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia, England, and Belgium, for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.

LITERATURE
The British Standards Institution for its six-page specification (BS-6008) of the proper way to make a cup of tea.

SCIENCE EDUCATION The Kansas State Board of Education and the Colorado State Board of Education, for mandating that children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease.

MEDICINE
Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord, Norway, for carefully collecting, classifying, and contemplating which kinds of containers his patients chose when submitting urine samples. (REFERENCE: "Unyttig om urinprøver," Arvid Vatle, Tidsskift for Den norske laegeforening (The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association), no. 8, March 20, 1999, p. 1178.)

CHEMISTRY
Takeshi Makino, president of The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka, Japan, for his involvement with S-Check, an infidelity detection spray that wives can apply to their husbands' underwear.

BIOLOGY
Dr. Paul Bosland, director of The Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company of Seoul, Korea, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit.

PEACE
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong of Johannesburg, South Africa, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower.

MANAGED HEALTH CARE
The late George and Charlotte Blonsky of New York City and San Jose, California, for inventing a device (US Patent #3,216,423) to aid women in giving birth -- the woman is strapped onto a circular table, and the table is then rotated at high speed.

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1998

SAFETY ENGINEERING
Troy Hurtubise, of North Bay, Ontario, for developing, and personally testing a suit of armor that is impervious to grizzly bears. (REFERENCE: "Project Grizzly", produced by the National Film Board of Canada.)

BIOLOGY
Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac. (REFERENCE: "Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)," Peter F. Fong, Peter T. Huminski, and Lynette M. D'urso, "Journal of Experimental Zoology, vol. 280, 1998, pp. 260-64.)

PEACE
Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.

CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste of France, for his homeopathic discovery that not only does water have memory, but that the information can be transmitted over telephone lines and the Internet. (NOTE: Benveniste also won the 1991 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize.) (REFERENCE:"Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link," J. Benveniste, P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa, "Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology - Program and abstracts of papers to be presented during scientific sessions AAAAI/AAI.CIS Joint Meeting February 21-26, 1997")

SCIENCE EDUCATION
Dolores Krieger, Professor Emerita, New York University, for demonstrating the merits of therapeutic touch, a method by which nurses manipulate the energy fields of ailing patients by carefully avoiding physical contact with those patients.

STATISTICS
Jerald Bain of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Kerry Siminoski of the University of Alberta for their carefully measured report, "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size." (Published in "Annals of Sex Research," vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 231-5.)

PHYSICS
Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness. (REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra's books "Quantum Healing," "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind," etc.)

ECONOMICS. Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.

MEDICINE
To Patient Y and to his doctors, Caroline Mills, Meirion Llewelyn, David Kelly, and Peter Holt, of Royal Gwent Hospital, in Newport, Wales, for the cautionary medical report, "A Man Who Pricked His Finger and Smelled Putrid for 5 Years." (Published in "The Lancet," vol. 348, November 9, 1996, p. 1282.)

LITERATURE
Dr. Mara Sidoli of Washington, DC, for her illuminating report, "Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread." (Published in "Journal of Analytical Psychology," vol. 41, no. 2, 1996, pp. 165-78.]

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1997

BIOLOGY
T. Yagyu and his colleagues from the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, from Kansai Medical University in Osaka, Japan, and from Neuroscience Technology Research in Prague, Czech Republic, for measuring people's brainwave patterns while they chewed different flavors of gum. (Published as "Chewing gum flavor affects measures of global complexity of multichannel EEG," T. Yagyu, et al., "Neuropsychobiology," vol. 35, 1997, pp. 46-50.)

ENTOMOLOGY
Mark Hostetler of the University of Florida, for his scholarly book, "That Gunk on Your Car," which identifies the insect splats that appear on automobile windows. (The book is published by Ten Speed Press.)

ASTRONOMY
Richard Hoagland of New Jersey, for identifying artificial features on the moon and on Mars, including a human face on Mars and ten-mile high buildings on the far side of the moon. (REFERENCE: "The Monuments of Mars : A City on the Edge of Forever," by Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA,1996.)

COMMUNICATIONS
Sanford Wallace, president of Cyber Promotions of Philadelphia -- neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk mail to all the world.

PHYSICS
John Bockris of Texas A&M University, for his wide- ranging achievements in cold fusion, in the transmutation of base elements into gold, and in the electrochemical incineration of domestic rubbish.

LITERATURE
Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips and Yoav Rosenberg of Israel, and Michael Drosnin of the United States, for their hairsplitting statistical discovery that the bible contains a secret, hidden code. (REFERENCE: Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg,'s original research was published as "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," "(Statistical Science)," Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994, pp. 429-38. Drosnin's popular book, "The Bible Code," was published by Simon & Schuster.)

MEDICINE
Carl J. Charnetski and Francis X. Brennan, Jr. of Wilkes University, and James F. Harrison of Muzak Ltd. in Seattle, Washington, for their discovery that listening to elevator Muzak stimulates immunoblobulin A (IgA) production, and thus may help prevent the common cold.

ECONOMICS
Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, the father and mother of Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.

PEACE
Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey, England for his lovingly rendered and ultimately peaceful report "The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods." (Published in "Perception 1993," vol 22, pp. 745-53.)

METEOROLOGY
Bernard Vonnegut of the State University of Albany, for his revealing report, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed." (Published in "Weatherwise," October 1975, p. 217.)

Initiated by Blowdart and continued by me because of practical node-length limits

1996

BIOLOGY
Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, "Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches." (Published in "British Medical Journal," vol. 309, Dec 24-31, 1994, p. 1689.)

MEDICINE
James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobaccco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified to the US Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.

PHYSICS
Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side. (REFERENCE: "Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants," "European Journal of Physics," vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.)

PEACE
Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald Moi of Oslo, Norway, for their cautionary medical report "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll." (Published in "Genitourinary Medicine," vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322.)

CHEMISTRY
George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering world record time for igniting a barbeque grill-three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen.

BIODIVERSITY
Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct "mini-species," each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length. (REFERENCE: the series "Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory," published by the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970's and 1980's.)

LITERATURE
The editors of the journal "Social Text," for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. (The paper was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Alan Sokal, "Social Text," Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.)

ECONOMICS
Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery that "financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease.

ART
Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo. (REFERENCE: "Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass")

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1995

NUTRITION
John Martinez of J. Martinez & Company in Atlanta, for Luak Coffee, the world's most expensive coffee, which is made from coffee beans ingested and excreted by the luak (aka, the palm civet), a bobcat-like animal native to Indonesia.

PHYSICS
D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, of the Institute of Food Research, Norwich, England, for their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal, published in the report entitled "A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes." (Published in "Powder Technology," November, 1994, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 189-96.)

ECONOMICS
Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial institution has its limits. (REFERENCE: "Barings Lost : Nick Leeson and the Collapse of Barings Plc," and "Big Bets Gone Bad")

MEDICINE
Marcia E. Buebel, David S. Shannahoff-Khalsa, and Michael R. Boyle, for their invigorating study entitled "The Effects of Unilateral Forced Nostril Breathing on Cognition." (Published in "International Journal of Neuroscience," vol. 57, 1991, pp. 239- 249.)

LITERATURE
David B. Busch and James R. Starling, of Madison, Wisconsin, for their deeply penetrating research report, "Rectal foreign bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World's Literature." The citations include reports of, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil can with potato stopper; eleven different forms of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs; a jeweler's saw; a frozen pig's tail; a tin cup; a ]beer glass]; and one patient's remarkable ensemble collection consisting of spectacles, a suitcase key, a tobacco pouch and a magazine. (Published in "Surgery," September 1986, pp. 512-519.)

PEACE
The Taiwan National Parliament, for demonstrating that politicians gain more by punching, kicking and gouging each other than by waging war against other nations.

PSYCHOLOGY
Shigeru Watanabe, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita, of Keio University, for their success in training pigeons to discriminate between the paintings of Picasso and those of Monet. (REFERENCE: "Pigeons' Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso," "Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," vol. 63, 1995, pp. 165-174.)

PUBLIC HEALTH
Martha Kold Bakkevig of Sintef Unimed in Trondheim, Norway, and Ruth Nielson of the Technical University of Denmark, for their exhaustive study, "Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold." (Published in "Ergonomics," vol 37, no. 8, Aug. 1994 , pp. 1375-89.)

DENTISTRY
Robert H. Beaumont, of Shoreview, Minnesota, for his incisive study "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss." ," vol. 61, no. 2, Feb. 1990, pp. 123-5.

CHEMISTRY
Bijan Pakzad of Beverly Hills, for creating DNA Cologne and DNA Perfume, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle.

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1994

BIOLOGY
W. Brian Sweeney, Brian Krafte-Jacobs, Jeffrey W. Britton, and Wayne Hansen, for their breakthrough study, "The Constipated Serviceman: Prevalence Among Deployed US Troops," and especially for their numerical analysis of bowel movement frequency. (Published in "Military Medicine," vol. 158, August, 1993, pp. 346-348.)

PEACE
John Hagelin of Maharishi University and The Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, promulgator of peaceful thoughts, for his experimental conclusion that 4,000 trained meditators caused an 18 percent decrease in violent crime in Washington, D.C. (REFERENCE: "Interim Report: Results of the National Demonstration Project To Reduce Violent Crime and Improve Governmental Effectiveness In Washington, D.C., June 7 to July 30, 1993," Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, Fairfield, Iowa")

MEDICINE
This prize is awarded in two parts. First, to Patient X, formerly of the US Marine Corps, valiant victim of a venomous bite from his pet rattlesnake, for his determined use of electroshock therapy -- at his own insistence, automobile sparkplug wires were attached to his lip, and the car engine revved to 3000 rpm for five minutes. Second, to Dr. Richard C. Dart of the Rocky Mountain Poison Center and Dr. Richard A. Gustafson of The University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, for their well-grounded medical report: "Failure of Electric Shock Treatment for Rattlesnake Envenomation." (Published in "Annals of Emergency Medicine," vol. 20, no. 6, June 1991, pp. 659-61.)

ENTOMOLOGY
Robert A. Lopez of Westport, NY, valiant veterinarian and friend of all creatures great and small, for his series of experiments in obtaining ear mites from cats, inserting them into his own ear, and carefully observing and analyzing the results. (Published in "The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association," vol. 203, no. 5, Sept. 1, 1993, pp. 606-7.)

PSYCHOLOGY
Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner of the psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.

PHYSICS
The Japanese Meterological Agency, for its seven-year study of whether earthquakes are caused by catfish wiggling their tails.

LITERATURE
L. Ron Hubbard, ardent author of science fiction and founding father of Scientology, for his crackling Good Book, "Dianetics," which is highly profitable to mankind or to a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY
Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow, wise writer of logical legislation, for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.

ECONOMICS
Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb: " davilar," meaning, "to botch things up royally."

MATHEMATICS
The Southern Baptist Church of Alabama, mathematical measurers of morality, for their county-by-county estimate of how many Alabama citizens will go to Hell if they don't repent.

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1993

PSYCHOLOGY
John Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University, mental visionaries, for their leaping conclusion that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space, probably were -- and especially for their conclusion "the focus of the abduction is the production of children. (REFERENCE: "Secret Life : Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions")

CONSUMER ENGINEERING
Ron Popeil, incessant inventor and perpetual pitchman of late night television, for redefining the industrial revolution with such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, the Cap Snaffler, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler. (REFERENCE: "The Salesman of the Century : Inventing, Marketing, and Selling on TV : How I Did It and How You Can Too!")

BIOLOGY
Paul Williams Jr. of the Oregon State Health Division and Kenneth W. Newell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bold biological detectives, for their pioneering study, "Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs." (Published in American Journal of Public Health and the Nation's Health, vol. 60, no. 5, May 1970, pp. 926-9.)

ECONOMICS
Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of "The Great Depression of 1990" ($17.95) and "Surviving the Great Depression of 1990" ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse.

PEACE
The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Phillipines, suppliers of sugary hopes and dreams, for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation's history.

VISIONARY TECHNOLOGY
Presented jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so.

CHEMISTRY
James Campbell and Gaines Campbell of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, dedicated deliverers of fragrance, for inventing scent strips, the odious method by which perfume is applied to magazine pages.

LITERATURE
E. Topol, R. Califf, F. Van de Werf, P. W. Armstrong, and their 972 co-authors, for publishing a medical research paper which has one hundred times as many authors as pages. (The study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 329, no. 10, September 2, 1993, pp. 673-82.)

MATHEMATICS
Robert Faid of Greenville, South Carolina, farsighted and faithful seer of statistics, for calculating the exact odds (8,606,091,751,882:1) that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist. (REFERENCE: "Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?")

PHYSICS
Louis Kervran of France, ardent admirer of alchemy, for his conclusion that the calcium in chickens' eggshells is created by a process of cold fusion. (REFERENCE: "Biological Transmutations and their applications in: Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Ecology, Medicine, Nutrition, Agronomy, Geology")

MEDICINE
James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr., medical men of mercy, for their painstaking research report, "Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis." (Published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1990, pp. 305-7.)

1992

MEDICINE
F. Kanda, E. Yagi, M. Fukuda, K. Nakajima, T. Ohta and O. Nakata of the Shisedo Research Center in Yokohama, for their pioneering research study "Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour," especially for their conclusion that people who think they have foot odor do, and those who don't, don't. Published in British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 122, no. 6, June 1990, pp. 771-6.

ARCHEOLOGY
Eclaireurs de France, the Protestant youth group whose name means "those who show the way," fresh-scrubbed removers of grafitti, for erasing the ancient paintings from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave near the French village of Brunquiel.

ECONOMICS
The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.

BIOLOGY
Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control. REFERENCE: "The Babymaker : Fertility Fraud and the Fall of Dr. Cecil Jacobson"

CHEMISTRY
Ivette Bassa, constructor of colorfulcolloids, for her role in the crowning achievement of twentieth century chemistry, the synthesis of bright blue Jell-O.

PHYSICS
David Chorley and Doug Bower, lions of low-energy physics, for their circular contributions to field theory based on the geometrical destruction of English crops.

PEACE
Daryl Gates, former Police Chief of the City of Los Angeles, for his uniquely compelling methods of bringing people together.

NUTRITION
The utilizers of Spam, courageous consumers of canned comestibles, for 54 years of undiscriminating digestion.

LITERATURE
Yuri Struchkov, unstoppable author from the Institute of
Organoelemental Compounds in Moscow, for the 948 scientific papers he published between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days.

ART
Presented jointly to Jim Knowlton, modern Renaissance man, for his classic anatomy poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom," and to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts for encouraging Mr. Knowlton to extend his work in the form of a pop-up book.

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1991

CHEMISTRY
Jacques Benveniste, prolific proseletizer and dedicated
correspondent of "Nature," for his persistent discovery that water, H2O, is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating to his satisfaction that water is able to remember events long after all trace of those events has vanished.

PHYSICS
Thomas Kyle, detector of atoms and original man of knowledge, for his discovery of the heaviest element in the universe, Administratium.

MEDICINE
Alan Kligerman, deviser of digestive deliverance, vanquisher of vapor, and inventor of Beano, for his pioneering work with anti-gas liquids that prevent bloat, gassiness, discomfort and embarassment.

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Josiah Carberry of Brown University, bold explorer and eclectic seeker of knowledge, for his pioneering work in the field of Psychoceramics, the study of cracked pots.

EDUCATION
J. Danforth Quayle, consumer of time and occupier of space, for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.

PEDESTRIAN TECHNOLOGY
Paul DeFanti, wizard of structures and crusader for public safety, for his invention of the Buckybonnet, a geodesic fashion structure that pedestrians wear to protect their heads and preserve their composure.

BIOLOGY
Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation, for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobellians and Olympians.

ECONOMICS
Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted.

LITERATURE
Erich Von Daniken, visionary raconteur and author of "Chariots of the Gods," for explaining how human civilization was influenced by ancient astronauts from outer space.

PEACE
Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and first champion of the Star Wars weapons system, for his lifelong efforts to change the meaning of peace as we know it.

2001

MEDICINE
Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts." PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 24, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1.

PHYSICS
David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards.

BIOLOGY
Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.

ECONOMICS
Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia and who has since moved to Columbia University, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. REFERENCE:"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.

LITERATURE
John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive.

PSYCHOLOGY
Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children." PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61.

ASTROPHYSICS
Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark).

PEACE
Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World."

TECHNOLOGY
Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012.

PUBLIC HEALTH
Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents. REFERENCE: "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.