For 35 Years, Boston Celebrated Science That Made Us Laugh. This Year, the Scientists Won't Come.

Ig Nobel Prizes are Leaving Boston

The Ig Nobel Prizes are leaving the United States for the first time — and the reason one of Boston’s strangest traditions is moving to Switzerland isn’t funny.

Boston has lost plenty of institutions over the years. Restaurants close. Bookstores disappear. Music clubs become condos. Traditions that seemed permanent quietly become something we used to do.

But I don't think I had the Ig Nobel Prizes leaving Boston for Switzerland on my list.

On Thursday, September 3, the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will be held in Zurich.

That wonderfully ridiculous name is intentional. So is almost everything else about the Ig Nobels.

Since 1991, the prizes have celebrated research that, in the words of the organizers, first makes people laugh, then makes them think.

And for their first 35 years, they were a distinctly Boston-area institution.

The first ceremony was held at the MIT Museum in Cambridge in 1991. It moved to MIT's Kresge Auditorium for the next three years and then crossed Cambridge to Harvard's Sanders Theatre in 1995, where generations of scientists discovered that receiving an international science prize could involve Nobel laureates, paper airplanes and considerably less dignity than they might have expected.

The pandemic moved the ceremony online for several years. It came home to MIT in 2024 and moved across the river to Boston University in 2025.

Now it is leaving the country.

Not because Zurich offered a nicer theater. Not because Boston got tired of it.

Because the people who run it no longer believe they can responsibly ask scientists from around the world to come here.

That's where the funny story stops being funny.

Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams announced earlier this year that the ceremony would move to Europe because of concerns about visas and the safety of international visitors traveling to the United States.

Four of the ten 2025 prize recipients had already decided not to come to the United States to accept their awards in person.

Abrahams told the Associated Press:

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.”

He said organizers could not in good conscience ask this year's laureates or the international journalists covering them to travel here.

So they're going to Zurich instead.

Think about that for a minute.

This isn't some giant international convention shopping for the cheapest city or the biggest convention hall. This is a quirky little piece of Boston intellectual culture that grew up around MIT and Harvard and survived for 35 years precisely because this is the kind of place where something like the Ig Nobels makes perfect sense.

Only in Boston. Or maybe Cambridge.

The Ig Nobels never made fun of science as much as they made science fun.

That's an important distinction.

Real Nobel laureates have presented the prizes. Scientists have traveled from around the world to accept them. The ceremonies have included mini-operas, absurd demonstrations, strange speeches and the famous barrage of paper airplanes at Sanders Theatre.

And the research could be wonderfully improbable.

Ig Nobel history includes scientists studying subjects most of us would never imagine could become scientific research at all. Researchers have examined nose picking, the proper way to make a cup of tea and inventions including a machine designed to assist childbirth by spinning a woman around.

The joke was never that science was stupid.

The joke was that human curiosity is endless.

Sometimes a ridiculous question produces a serious answer. Sometimes ridiculous research exposes something important. Sometimes it is simply wonderful to watch very smart people refuse to take themselves too seriously.

That feels particularly at home in a place containing Harvard, MIT, Boston University and several hundred thousand people perfectly willing to argue over an obscure scientific point before breakfast.

And now we get a watch party.

There is something almost painfully appropriate about what happens in Cambridge on September 3.

While the actual Ig Nobel ceremony takes place at the Kongresshaus in Zurich, Swissnex in Cambridge is hosting an official Boston watch party.

Boston will watch Switzerland host the Boston tradition that left because its international guests no longer felt comfortable coming to America.

You couldn't write the symbolism much better than that.

Fortunately, the story doesn't quite end there.

The Igs are coming back to Cambridge — sort of.

On September 24, Swissnex and Improbable Research will hold BOST-Ig: An Ig Nobel Celebration at Swissnex, 420 Broadway in Cambridge.

Several of this year's Ig Nobel winners are scheduled to appear and talk about their research.

There will be a musical tribute to the late Tom Lehrer, the brilliant mathematician and satirical songwriter who was a longtime friend of the Ig Nobels and participated in several of the early ceremonies. Amanda Palmer and Thomas Michel will perform three of his songs.

And because apparently even that isn't sufficiently Boston, the evening will also include science-related paintings from the Museum of Bad Art.

Ig Nobel winners. Tom Lehrer. The Museum of Bad Art. In Cambridge.

Now that sounds like the Boston I know.

But something has changed.

I wish this were simply a funny little story about one of our strangest traditions moving to Switzerland.

It isn't.

For decades, Greater Boston has sold itself to the world as a place people come to think.

Students come here. Scientists come here. Doctors come here. Researchers come here.

People cross oceans because Harvard and MIT and the hospitals, laboratories, universities and biotech companies clustered around Boston and Cambridge have made this one of the great centers of intellectual exchange in the world.

That depends upon something we rarely talk about.

People have to be willing to come.

An international science organization deciding that it can no longer responsibly invite its guests into the United States should bother us far beyond the loss of one eccentric ceremony.

The Ig Nobels are funny.

The reason they're leaving isn't.

On September 3, somewhere in Zurich, scientists will once again receive prizes for research that makes people laugh and then makes them think.

Here in Boston, maybe we ought to do the same thing.

Laugh at the absurdity.

Then think about what it means when the scientists stop coming.

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