Ig Nobels to move awards to Switzerland due to concern over US travel visas

The Ig Nobel Prize is an annual satirical award for scientific achievement. Keystone-SDA

The annual ceremony of the Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, is normally held in the United States. This September it will take place in Zurich after organisers deemed the US “unsafe.”

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The Ig Nobels – a play on the word ignoble – have been awarded every year since 1991 in Boston, United States. The satirical prize, which aims to “make people laugh and then think”, has become an institution in the scientific community, and few people turn down the honour.

For the first time, the ceremony will be held in Zurich on September 3. The shift from the US to Europe is due to concerns about the political situation and attendees getting visas, organisers said on Monday.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country [US],” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview.

“We cannot, in good conscience, ask the new laureates, or the international journalists covering the event, to travel to the United States this year,” said Abrahams.

This year’s ceremony is being produced in collaboration with the federal technology institute ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, Abrahams said.

“Switzerland has nurtured many unexpected good things – Albert Einstein’s physics, the world economy and the cuckoo clock leap to mind – and is again helping the world appreciate improbable people and ideas,” he said.

Every other year in Zurich

In an interview in December, Abrahams told the AFP news agency that several prize-winners had decided not to attend the 2025 awards ceremony for fear of being harassed by the US authorities.

For the coming years, the organisers plan to hold the ceremony in Zurich every other year. In the odd years, it will travel to different European cities. “It’ll be a bit like the Eurovision Song Contest,” said Abrahams.

Winners have for the past 35 years traveled to the US to collect their prizes – and be showered with paper airplanes. Last year, winners included a team of researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza that lizards preferred to eat.

The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.

Adapted from French by AI/sb