This is an audio long read from nature. In this episode, How a Silly Science Prize

changed my career. Written by Katrina Clark and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.

Eleanor Maguire wasn't too thrilled when she was first offered an Ig Nobel Prize.

The neuroscientist at University College London was being honoured for her study

showing that London taxi drivers have larger hippocampi in their brains than do people in other professions. But she worried that accepting

the prize would be a disaster for her career. So she quietly turned it down. Three years later,

the prize's founder, Mark Abrams, contacted Maguire again with the same offer.

This time, she knew more about the satirical award that bills itself as honoring achievements that,

quote, make people laugh, then think, end quote. She decided to accept. On the way to the ceremony, her taxi driver was so delighted to learn about his enlarged hippocampus

that he refused to accept a fee from her.

McGuire credits the prize with bringing more attention to her work.

It was useful for my career because people wanted to talk about it,

she says, adding that it was on the front pages of newspapers when it came out and struck a chord with

people. As one measure of the Ig Nobel's impact, McGuire says that she was once introduced as,

quote, the most famous member, end quote,

of a panel that happened to also include three Nobel laureates.

There were only questions about taxi drivers and not anything to the Nobel laureates there, she says.

Other researchers have similar stories about winning the famous, some would say infamous,

awards. Abrams created them in 1991, after years of collecting examples of weird research that

he included in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, which he was editor of at the time. I kept meeting people

who'd unknowingly done very funny things that almost no one knew about, he says. The response from

the scientific community was mixed at the start. But Abram says that the Ig Nobel's are not out

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