News

BMJ wins an Ig Nobel prize

Annabel Ferriman, BMJ

The BMJ gloried in new laurels last week when its article on the imaging of male and female genitals during coitus, published in last year's Christmas issue, won the prize for medicine at the annual Ig Nobel prizegiving at Harvard University (BMJ 1999;319:1596-600).

The prizes, which have been given out every year since 1991, are for achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced." They are awarded by the science humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research and are sponsored jointly by the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Society, and the Harvard Radcliffe Society of Physics Students. They are designed to spur people's interest in science and medicine.

The BMJ was not the only British institution to win an award at the ceremony, where genuine Nobel laureates hand out the prizes. The Royal Navy won the peace award for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells and instead to just shout "Bang!"

A Scottish team won the public health prize for an article entitled "The collapse of toilets in Glasgow." The article, by three consultants in accident and emergency medicineJonathan Wyatt of the Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, Gordon McNaughton of the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, and William Tullet of the Western Infirmary, Glasgowwas published in the Scottish Medical Journal (1993;38:185).

It described three patientsa 14 year old girl and two young menwho all sustained injuries when porcelain lavatory pans collapsed under their body weight. One sustained a 6 cm wound to the right buttock. All three lavatories were old, and the authors advised caution when using toilets over a certain age, suggesting that people might want to adopt a continental approach and hover above the toilet seats.

Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University won the physics prize, along with his coresearcher, Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, for using magnets to levitate a frog and a sumo wrestler (European Journal of Physics 1997;18:307-13).

All prizes are given for genuine exploits, except in the first year of the awards, when three prizes were awarded for apocryphal feats.

(Credit: SCOTTISH MEDICAL JOURNAL ) Bum deal from Glasgow toilets