Welcome to my blog on surgery and related sciences. Here I will express views on the art and science of surgery in general. Any comments and thoughts are most welcomed.

Thursday 15 November 2012

Improbable research and the Ig Nobel Prize

If you've never heard about the improbable research you should go visit the homepage www.improbable.com. Improbable Research

They award prizes for researcg that first make people laugh, then think. Among the several categories are research iin medicla fields, such as 'anatomy' and 'medicine'.
The 2012 winners in these two categories are:


ANATOMY PRIZEFrans de Waal [The Netherlands and USA] and Jennifer Pokorny [USA] for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.
REFERENCE: "Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception" Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008.

MEDICINE PRIZEEmmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.
REFERENCE: "Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery," Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295–8.
REFERENCE: "Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe," E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotté, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.

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