Miscellaneous

Ig Nobel ceremony moves to Zurich

organisers cite US visa uncertainty for winners and journalists, a joke prize becomes a border-policy weather vane

Images

The Ig Nobel trophy, made from an empty flower pot and letters from the element charts, at a prize ceremony at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2015. Photograph: Charles Krupa/AP The Ig Nobel trophy, made from an empty flower pot and letters from the element charts, at a prize ceremony at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2015. Photograph: Charles Krupa/AP theguardian.com

The Ig Nobel prizes will leave the United States for the first time in their 36-year history, with this year’s ceremony scheduled for Zurich, according to the Associated Press as carried by The Guardian. Organisers said the move is driven by concern that winners and international journalists may not be able to obtain US travel visas reliably enough to attend. The event, run by the Annals of Improbable Research, has traditionally been staged in the Boston area at venues including Harvard, MIT and Boston University.

The Ig Nobels are not a high-stakes scientific summit; the trophies are famously improvised, the audience throws paper aeroplanes, and the winning research is chosen for making people “laugh and then think”. That is precisely why the relocation is a useful signal. When a light, media-friendly academic ritual decides that border friction is too unpredictable to manage, it suggests a broader problem for conferences that do involve grants, hiring and collaboration. Visa systems do not just filter entrants; they also shape where professional networks form, where journalists go to cover research, and which cities become default meeting points.

Organisers framed the decision as a risk management issue rather than a political statement. Marc Abrahams, the ceremony’s master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told AP it had become “unsafe” to ask guests to travel to the US and that he could not “in good conscience” invite winners and reporters under current conditions. The backdrop, the report notes, is President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has included heightened scrutiny of student and visitor exchange visas alongside deportations of illegal migrants.

The details underline how quickly uncertainty turns into absence. Last year, four of the ten prize-winning groups did not travel to Boston to collect their awards. The winners included researchers who tested whether zebra-like stripes painted on cows deter flies, and a study on which pizzas lizards prefer—work that is easy to celebrate remotely, but also easy to skip when travel becomes a gamble.

Zurich’s hosts will include institutions in the ETH Domain and the University of Zurich, and Abrahams said the ceremony will return to Zurich every other year while rotating through other European cities in between. There are, for now, no plans to bring it back to the US.

A satirical science prize that built its brand on a Harvard stage is now planning its calendar around Swiss venues because the visa outcome is no longer something organisers feel they can assume.