Thursday, October 20, 2005

Penguin News

Th Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research to scientist who have done something that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think," were awarded two weeks ago, and it was not by oversight that I failed to mention that this year's Fluid Dynamics Ig Nobel went to a study of pressure when penguins go guano.

The Ig Nobels are an amusing award ceremony with the laudable goal of celebrating unusual and imaginitive science, and drawing attention to scientific pursuits. The official qualification for the prize is research that "cannot or should not be reproduced." Here's a nice, positive discussion on that phrase from the editor of AIR. Unfortunately, the people covering the iggies don't usually characterize the awards in the spirit they are intended. It's a funny human interest story for news outlets to fill some time or space with, but they always seem to do it with a bit of an interrobang, as in "Someone actually invented testicle implants for neutered dogs?!"
Although the Ig Nobels can be a thought-provoking tidbit for those who tend toward thought provocation, most people only give it the 10 seconds worth of brain time it takes to process, "Penguin poop? Someone did a study on penguin poop?"

The subtext of the Ig Nobel coverage is almost uniformly one of highlighting the most egregious wastes of resources for scientific research. After all, what use is it to humanity to know what sort of pressure builds up when penguins poop? Maybe a few penguin keepers would like to know, but shouldn't we be curing cancer or something like that?

The thing with scientific research is that a lot of it is done without any idea of what the result might end up being. A few years ago, we might have wondered why we were throwing money after a researcher who wanted to find out what made certain species of jellyfish glow. Who gives a jellyfish tentacle why they glow? Turns out, the thing that makes jellyfish glow is Green Fluorescent Protein, and it can be attached to any number of substances. Again, who cares? Then someone figured out that if you attached it to a substance that is in pretty much every cell of the body, you could make mice that glow like ghosts. Mutant glowing mice, while cool, still score about a zero on the usefulness meter in the minds of the general public, particularly as they are not available as housepets. But these green fluorescent mice can be implanted with cancer cells that fluoresce red, and viola! Now, by switching on light, researchers can track exactly how a cancer grows and spreads throughout the body of a living being, bringing us a big step closer to figuring out how to stop it. Finding out why jellyfish glow isn't such a stupid waste of time anymore, but years ago, no one could have seen that coming.

As for the penguin guano study, it's noteworthy, though not noted in any of the press coverage I read, that the study was completely noninvasive. Penguins are protected species, and permits are required to get within 5 meters of them in the wild (presumably this doesn't apply to certain penguins that live in suburban New Zealand and regularly approach humans of their own volition). The study was done entirely by observing penguins from a distance. I'm sure the penguins preferred that to having pressure gauges attached to their butts.

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