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Cloning around: the world premier of The Seedy Opera, a tribute to one of last year's winners, Richard Seed, the Chicago-based former physicist who has vowed to clone himself and others. Credit: J. CHASE/HARVARD PHOTO SERVICES

Heredity was the theme of the ‘Ninth First Annual’ Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University last week, where the King and Queen of Swedish Meatballs presided as usual over the festivities.

Beach-balls, paper aeroplanes and giant doughnuts sailed through the air of a Harvard University auditorium, while Lawyers For and Against Heredity carried placards and a group of female physics students called Babes in Boyland marched in procession. In keeping with the heredity motif, descendants of famous scientists, including Francis Crick's granddaughter, took the stage.

The world premier of The Seedy Opera, a tribute to scientist and entrepreneur Richard Seed (winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998), who has vowed to clone himself and other humans, was presented in four acts. Four Harvard Nobel laureates—Sheldon Glashow, Robert Wilson, Dudley Herschbach and William Lipscomb—played the parts of cloned sheep in the opera.

This year, Ig Nobel prizes were awarded in ten categories for work that either “cannot or should not be reproduced”. Recipients came from as far afield as Australia, Japan, Norway and the United States to collect the coveted Ig prize, which resembles a plaster frog.

The science-education prize was issued jointly to the Kansas and Colorado boards of education for mandating that “children should not believe in Darwin's theory of evolution, any more than they believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, Faraday's and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease”.

Commenting on the award, University of Kansas biologist Douglas Ruden warned other states “not to let what happened in Kansas happen to you. As Dan Quayle said: ‘A mind is a terrible thing to lose’.”

Len Fisher of England and Australia captured one of two physics prizes, for calculating the optimal way to dunk a biscuit (see Nature 397, 469; 1999). The other award went to Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia for calculating how to make a teapot spout that does not drip.

Norway's Arvid Vatle earned the prize for medicine for an analysis of the containers chosen by patients for urine samples. The late George and Charlotte Blonsky were posthumously awarded the managed health care prize for inventing a high-speed rotary chair for women in labour, to accelerate the birth process. “As chair of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, it's my job to prevent this kind of medicine,” said JoAnn Manson of Harvard Medical School.

Takeshi Makino of Japan won the chemistry prize for developing an infidelity-detection spray for wives to apply to their husbands' underwear. The peace prize went to South Africa's Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong for inventing a car burglar alarm that comes equipped with a flame-thrower. “These achievements speak for themselves,” claimed master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research.