Prizes: noble and ignoble

This year the announcements for the big prize carried the amazing information that one of the recipients had also won the rather less respectable counterpart called the Ig Nobel Prize some years back. Dr Geim of Manchester University had on that occasion levitated a frog on a magnetic field for whatever reason, and the Harvard-based Annals of Improbable Research chose him for the Physics Prize in 2000.

The Ig Nobel Prize was introduced in 1991 and has the paraphernalia associated with a regular prize, if not all the pomp and grandeur of its big brother. A genuine Nobel laureate is usually the chief guest at the award ceremony, which is held in a well-known theatre in Harvard campus. Presumably, there is a lot of drinking and merrymaking similar to the other prize. The Ig Nobel is awarded for contributions "that make people laugh first and then force them also to think" — according to the organisers.

This year (2010) some of the Ig Nobel winning contributions were: for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride, for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix, for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain, and the economics prize went to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar "for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof"; in reality these people were the biggest culprits in taking the American and other linked world economies to the verge of collapse in recent years.

Actually these works were not crank papers written solely as a prank. They went through rigorous refereeing by anonymous peers and were published in some of the most respected research journals in the respective fields. The hilarity of the content was sometimes missed by the authors as well as the editors, until the award was made.

Not all Nobel prizes command the same respect. The Peace prize is often controversial, if not quite ignoble. Gandhi never got it, almost certainly because the British government objected. After 9/11, within a span of three years three Muslims were awarded the Peace prize (after all, it is the religion of peace!), and more are certain to come for Iranians like Shirin Ebadi, or dissidents like this year's Chinese recipient. East Timor's rebel leaders also got it for their role in liberating their land from Muslim Indonesia. Two Israelis and Yasser Arafat received it, with the same 2:1 mighty occupier vs. weak owner breakdown as the Lucknow High Court judgement dividing the Babri Mosque site. Nuclear physicist Shakharov was a recipient for his criticism of the Soviet regime during cold war days. When Barack Obama was awarded the Peace Prize a few months after taking oath as president, there were sarcastic comments in Harvard circles suggesting that University undergrads be awarded the degree when they are admitted, because Harvard selects students who are most unlikely to fail.

The Literature prize also has gone to dissidents (pro-West authors from predominantly anti-West groups) a number of times. Boris Pasternak had to refuse it under pressure. Salman Rushdie probably has been in the short-list a number of times, and only the fear of terrorist attacks is standing between him and a trip to Sweden. Tagore got the prize a year after he hosted the crown prince of Sweden at his Jorasanko home. Of course, he deserved it anyway, definitely more than Winston Churchill who bagged it for his laborious and voluminous history reference books and for "oratory".

Dr Linus Pauling received the Nobel for Chemistry (nature of the chemical bond), and also for Peace. He was hoping for a third in Biology, first in close pursuit of the leaders in the determination of the structure of the DNA, and then as an advocate of mega dosage of vitamin C to cure most ailments. The double helical structure of the DNA was actually discovered first by Rosalind Franklin, who did not get the Prize as she died before it was awarded to Crick and Watson, who had seen her drawings after breaking open her drawers in King's College, and had quickly published their paper. And it is now known that antioxidants such as vitamin C can in reality prevent many diseases.

Dr Geim's Physics Nobel this year, unlike his Ig Nobel frog-lifting exercise ten years ago, is drawing some criticism. People point out that using an adhesive tape to peel off a thin layer from a surface is nothing new, and that the resulting single atom carbon layer called graphene is yet to be of any practical use. Cynics argue that as Geim was born a Russian, then became a Dutch national and finally settled in England, one award could please three countries and that must have weighed heavily in his favour.

In Bangladesh we have a few state and many private awards. The Ekushey Padak and the Independence Award are usually given to people near the end of their career, or after death, and most recipients are quite respectable, though they have to wait for a favourable party to be in power for their turn. There is the sad story of a recipient in 1996 who turned up at the Award ceremony only to hear that his Award had been cancelled as the elections had brought the opposite party to power between the announcement and the ceremony.

Lesser private awards can be hilarious. One young lady, wife of a media boss, at one time was getting prizes at an alarming rate. Her husband collected a doctorate from somewhere, as politicians and civil servants often do. Many Collectors of Customs at Dhaka Airport used to be awarded literary prizes on a regular basis, along with genuine awardees. The organisers behind such awards must have given a lot of thought to the optimisation problem, i.e. the right blend of credibility, respectability and profit. Poet Shamsur Rahman, in all his innocence, was a greatest common factor as long as he lived.

Even awards from the Universities sometimes have to be taken with a grain of salt. The pro-VC of a public university is usually the chairman of all foundations and funds, including those giving prizes in memory of the near relations of the donors. On one occasion a pro-VC nominated a paper co-authored by himself for the prize for the "best paper of the year" in his subject. When another member, the Chairman of the department, expressed his shock, he simply threw the dissident out of the Committee despite protests from the donor, who was his student and is now living in the USA. The relieved Chairman later remarked to friends that he had a lot of sympathy for the pro-VC, since it seemed unlikely that he had ever earned any other prize in his life, and it must have meant a lot to him.

Believe it or not, two men have won the Nobel Prize and also silver medals in the Olympic Games. Niels Bohr, one of the greatest physicists of all time, who used to make mincemeat of Einstein's arguments in every debate on quantum theory, and who won the Nobel for Physics for a simple, elegant, but highly accurate model of the atom, was a member of the runners-up Danish soccer team in the 1908 games. Philip Noel-Baker, a British diplomat, won his medal for the "metric mile" in the 1920 Games, and a Peace Nobel in 1959. It is difficult to cheat these days in the Olympics, as there are a plethora of electronic devices, DNA testing, drug detectors etc. However, a couple of days ago we watched the Indian crowd at the archery contest in the Delhi Commonwealth Games making substantial noise to distract an obviously better English side to steal Gold for their own country. The tight-lipped Englishmen did not complain. Sometimes it is more important to retain one's dignity than to win. After her Delhi visit, our PM remarked in a euphoric mood that, like Duryodhan, she had achieved the most important thing — victory. Not everybody agreed.

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Dr Ahmed Shafee is a Professor of Physics at the University of Dhaka