Andre Geim remains the sole scientist to have won both an Ig Nobel prize and a Nobel Prize.
| Photo Credit: Bengt Oberger (CC BY-SA)
Recent reports stated that two Indian scientists had received Ig Nobel prize in the Engineering Design category in 2025. We know of the Nobel Prizes but the Ig Nobels?
As one report in Science pointed out, the Ig Nobel prizes are light-hearted events that offer a humorous satire about the prize. The ‘Ig’ prefix stands for a non-honourable or lower status and the prizes’ name is a pun on the word ‘ignoble’, striking a humorous contrast with the real Nobel Prizes, which advance our knowledge in science, technology, literature, peace, and economics.
These satirical prizes have been awarded annually since 1991 to promote public engagement with scientific research. They take aim at research that makes people laugh and then makes them think. Each winner receives a single banknote of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, which were worth 40 US cents when they were demonetised and are no longer in use. In contrast, each Nobel Prize winner receives a gold medal (engraved with the picture of the prizes’ founder Alfred Nobel) and around 11 million Swedish kronor, divided among up to three laureates if a prize is shared.
Each winner also gets to present her/his lecture at a ceremony in the Swedish Academy of Sciences in December every year. In contrast, the Ig Nobel is presented at a ceremony in Boston, Massachusetts and each winner is allowed only one minute to present their achievements.
Ig Nobel laureates of 2025
The Ig Nobel prizes are picked by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. According to their website, these are the 2025 Ig Nobel prize laureates: Tomoki Kojima and colleagues for experiments showing how cows painted with zebra-like stripes were bitten less often by flies (biology); Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal from Uttar Pradesh on how the experience of a shoe rack can be affected by foul-smelling shoes in it (engineering design or ergonomics); the medical historian and internist Prof. William Bean of Columbia University, USA, who documented how his fingernails grew (literature); Marcin Zajenkowski of Poland and Gilles Gignac of Australia for showing that people who are narcissists have their self-esteem rise when told they are intelligent (psychology); researchers from Nigeria, Togo, Italy, and France for showing how rainbow lizards acquire a taste for certain kinds of pizza (nutrition); Julie Mennella and Gory Beauchamp of the USA for showing how, when mothers eat garlic, their breast-feeding infants took in more milk (paediatrics); the team of Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich, and Frank Greenway of the USA for showing that Teflon, usually used to coat kitchen utensils, is a good additive to increase food volume and hence satiety without increasing the calorie content (chemistry); and for researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany for showing how consuming moderate amounts of alcohol can improve the ability to speak a foreign language (peace).
(Note: Prof. Bean passed away in 2020 and his son received the prize.)
It is interesting to note that so far only one scientist has won both an Ig Nobel prize and a Nobel Prize. This is the physicist Andre Geim of Manchester University in the UK. He was awarded the Ig Nobel prize in 2000 together with Michael Berry for levitating a frog in a strong magnetic field using its intrinsic magnetism, in the physics category. In 2010, Prof. Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene”.
dbala@lvpei.org
Published – October 04, 2025 05:30 am IST