A Swiss Ig Nobel laureate talks about side effects and placebo effects

Every year Ig Nobel prizes are handed out to unusual science that 'makes people laugh, then think'. The Swiss winner of the Ig Nobel 2024 for medicine talks to SWI swissinfo.ch about why his research is far from irrelevant. Award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions: this year the 2024 prize for chemistry was given to the authors of Franco-Dutch research that used chromatography to separate drunk worms from sober worms. The physiology prize went to the Japanese-US study which found that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. And a US team that managed to show the swimming abilities of a dead trout won the physics prize. Of course, we are not talking about the Nobel Prize, but the Ig Nobel, an annual celebration of the most “improbable” research from around the world – even the serious world of scientific research knows how to have a laugh now and then. Although the list of winning research might sound phony, this is far from the case.