Pharmacy Daily | Dispensary Corner 18 Sep 13

It’s that time of year - the annual Ig Nobel awards which honour researchers for their “comical scientific achievements”. Awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels highlight unusual scientific findings and are meant to entertain as well as encourage even the most bizarre innovation. This year’s Ig Nobels highlight some fabulous studies, including one which proved that people who think they are drunk also believe that they are sexy. A big winner this year was the Ig Nobel Public Health Prize, which was won by some doctors in Thailand who documented their specialised treatments for penile amputations. Apparently there’s been quite an epidemic of genital butchery - often of drunk men who made their wives angry, with Annals editor saying “a lot of the victims were brought to the same hospital and the doctors got pretty good at dealing with it”. The techniques in the paper worked in many cases, but had some difficulty in one situation where the amputated penis had been partly eaten by a duck. This year’s Ig Nobel Medicine Prize went to a group of researchers in Japan who “assessed the effect of listening to opera on heart transplant patients who are mice” - with the intriguing finding that the music “induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival”. The Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy went to a collaboration of scientists from Sweden, Germany, the UK, South Africa and Australia, who proved that dung beetles can navigate by observing the Milky Way. And the Ig Nobel for Chemistry went to a team of Japanese scientists who worked on a paper describing the highly complex biochemical process in which enzymes within onions make people cry.

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