The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical prize for scientific achievement, are moving from the United States to Europe for the first time due to concerns about obtaining visas for attendees, organizers announced Monday.
Hosted by Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will take place in Zurich. It is generally celebrated in the United States in September, a few weeks before the Nobel Prizes are announced.
“Over the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and publisher of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot, in good conscience, ask the new winners, nor the international journalists covering the event, to travel to the United States this year.”
The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, which has focused on deporting immigrants illegally in the United States as well as student and visitor exchange visa holders.
For the past 35 years, winners have traveled to the United States to collect their prizes and be showered with paper airplanes. Last year, among the winners was a team of researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe reflected on the types of pizza the lizards preferred to eat.
The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language and a researcher who studied nail growth for decades.
But four of last year’s 10 winners opted not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony took place at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.
This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with institutions in the ETH domain, a domain of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the University of Zurich, Abrahams said.
“Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things (Albert Einstein’s physics, the global economy and the cuckoo clock come to mind) and is once again helping the world appreciate unlikely people and ideas,” he said.
Milo Puhan, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich and winner of the Swiss Ig Nobel in 2017, welcomed the ceremony. “The Ig Nobel Prize makes research visible, and it does so with a wink,” said Puhan, whose research “showed that playing the didgeridoo trains the muscles and structures that keep the upper airways open, thereby reducing nighttime snoring and the severity of sleep apnea syndrome.”
Abrahams said the ceremony will be held in Zurich every two years. Meanwhile, the ceremony will move to other European cities.
There are no immediate plans to return the ceremony to the United States.
