The discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder has won Donatella Marazziti an Ig Nobel prize for chemistry.

The spoof prizes were presented on Thursday evening at Harvard University, ahead of next week’s genuine Nobel Prizes.

Marazziti and colleagues from the University of Pisa and University of California San Diego won the award for their paper in Psychological Medicine, entitled: “Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love.”

Last year Marazziti told New Scientist: “It’s often said that when you’re in love, you’re a little bit crazy. That may be true.”


The Ig Nobels are awarded for achievements that “cannot or should not be reproduced” and were handed out by four genuine Nobel prize winners. The event is organised by the science humour magazine “Annals of Improbable Research”.

Editor Marc Abrahams, closed the ceremony with the traditional, “If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.”

Another winner, for medicine, was Willibrord Weijmar Schultz with his colleagues from the University Hospital Groningen. Their revealing report was titled “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal” and published in the British Medical Journal.

At the time, Schultz said “It is important for doctors who operate in this area to have a knowledge of anatomy, and particularly of the living anatomy.”

The team concluded: “What started as artistic and scientific curiosity has now been realised. We have shown that magnetic resonance images of the female sexual response and the male and female genitals during coitus are feasible and beautiful.”

The prizes for computer science went to Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona. He invented PawSense, software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard. As soon as it senses the characteristic keystrokes of a strolling cat, it blocks further typing and starts making a noise that cats don’t like.

Perhaps less useful was the work which won Richard Wassersug of Dalhousie University the Ig Nobel prize for biology. His report, “On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica” appeared in The American Midland Naturalist.

Finally, the Ig Nobel for psychology was won by a sobering report by David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kreuger of the University of Illinois: “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognising one’s own incompetence leads to inflated self-assessments”, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

More information on the Ig Nobel prizes can be found at www.improbable.com.