Ig Nobel Prizes and medical research

Summary

• The Ig Nobel Prizes are ten awards given each year for research that, in the organisers' words, makes people "LAUGH, then THINK". Every winner is a real study, and Nobel laureates hand the prizes over.
• Not every scientist enjoys the joke. In 1996 Robert May, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, warned against poking fun at scientists without their consent, after British food scientists won for a study of soggy cereal. The organisers reply that "a lot of good science gets attacked because of its absurdity".
• The 2026 prize for medicine went to a 1977 study of how to blow your nose by the Japanese doctor Tokuji Unno. He measured the airflow and found that blowing one nostril at a time, while breathing out fully, is effective. He died in 2022, so a colleague collected the prize.
• Several earlier medicine prizes went to studies of everyday clinical problems.
  • In 2022, a team in Warsaw found that patients who ate ice cream during high dose chemotherapy had sores inside the mouth, called oral mucositis, about half as often as those who did not.
  • In 2024, a team in Hamburg found that in healthy volunteers, a dummy nasal spray that caused a mild burning feeling eased pain more than one that caused nothing.
  • In 2018, a team studied roller coaster rides as a way to help pass kidney stones.
• The 2026 ceremony was held in Zurich on 3 September. It was the first of the 36 ceremonies to take place outside the United States, because the organiser, Marc Abrahams, said in March that the country had become unsafe for guests.
• The next ceremony is in Antwerp on 5 September 2027. The organisers plan to return to Zurich every second year.

Dig deeper

• The Hamburg volunteers were told they would get a nasal spray of fentanyl, a strong painkiller, before a heat pain test. None of the sprays contained it. One held capsaicin, the hot part of chilli, and the other held salt water.
  • The authors warn of "an important confound in clinical trials". When a drug with side effects is compared with a placebo, a dummy treatment, the side effects alone may make the drug seem to work better.
  • In a trial of liraglutide, a weight loss injection, for childhood obesity, stomach side effects affected 80% of children on the drug and 54% on the placebo.
• The ice cream study looked back at the records of 74 patients at one hospital. 28.84% of those given ice cream developed mouth sores, against 59.09% of the rest. Records like these show that two things go together but cannot prove cause, as with the early evidence on smoking and lung cancer.
  • Cold narrows the blood vessels in the mouth, so less of the drug reaches its lining.
• Andre Geim shared the 2000 physics prize for using magnets to levitate a frog. In 2010 he and Konstantin Novoselov, both at the University of Manchester, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick. He was the first person to win both in his own name.
• The organisers almost always contact winners privately in advance and give them the option to decline. They say nearly everyone accepts. In 1996 the journal Chemistry & Industry answered May that serious work "will withstand transitory embarrassment".
• British winners include James Heathcote, whose 1995 paper in the BMJ asked "Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?" and won in 2017. In 2026 Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot and Stuart West, from the UK and the US, won for devising a more precise definition of kissing.

Ethical issues

Interview questions

• What do you know about the Ig Nobel Prizes?
• What did the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine reward?
• A team looked back at whether cancer patients who ate ice cream during chemotherapy got fewer mouth sores. What can this kind of study tell us, and what can it not?
• Is it ever right to deceive the volunteers in a research study?
• Why might a drug with noticeable side effects look better in a trial than it really is?
• You are a junior doctor, and a patient in a drug trial tells you the side effects prove they are on the real drug. How do you respond?
• What are the arguments for and against spending public money on research that sounds silly?
• Does laughing at science help or harm public trust in it?