IG Nobel Prizes Awarded for Imaginative Achievements
QUEST: Here on QUEST MEANS BUSINESS we do a lot of thinking and quite a lot of laughing. Well, the IG Nobel prizes honor achievements that make people do exactly that. They laugh and then think. And we wanted celebrate with them also after the 2016 winners were announced last night at Harvard, the IG Nobel. These were our favorites. In the field of economics, Sarah Forbes and Mark Avis for their work on assessing the perceived personalities of rocks. From a sales and marketing perspective. Them you have the field of chemistry, slightly more tongue in cheek, Volkswagen for solving the problem of excessive automobile emissions by producing fewer emissions when the cars are being tested. I am sure they weren't laughing about that in Germany. It is either magic or cheating depending on your point of view. And then the field of biology. Thomas Thwaites for creating prosthetic limbs that allowed him to live with and understand the movement of goats. And for that he won the IG Nobel award. And the IG Nobel award winner Thomas Thwaites joins me now. Sir, I mean, congratulations.</s>I -- THOMAS THWAITES, IG NOBEL PRIZE WINNER, BIOLOGY: Thank you.</s>QUEST: Why did you want to live as a goat for three days and what did you learn?</s>THWAITES: It is not as strange of a thought as it sounds.</s>QUEST: I assure it is, sir.</s>THWAITES: Maybe we need some introduction. I think we may have all had a thought like that, you know, certainly when I was a child, I can remember wanting to be the pet cat or something so I didn't have to trudge off to school. I think at root it was this, I was going through a bit of a slump, a down patch in my life, and I guess that thought recurred, wouldn't it be lovely to take a holiday from all of this become a goat.</s>QUEST: Of all of the animals you choose, why a goat?</s>THWAITES: Actually, I started off wanting to become an elephant, but after a bit of research, it became clear that -- I mean, it became clear that elephants, I don't know, they're almost a bit too human. They eat with an appendage, so I wanted to get away from that experience, and also they sort of seem to understand their own mortality, they're kind of -- I wanted to escape from those thoughts on my own mortality. I just wanted to be.</s>QUEST: So my final question, sir. What did you learn from this? Because the IG Nobels have a serious underlying point to them. Besides the good laugh that we had. What is did you learn?</s>THWAITE: I think it was a philosophical investigation. I think it was more a kind of a reminder that we are nothing but animals, ourselves. Despite all of our kind of wondrous sort of -- our wonderful minds, or wonderful brains. We are at root animals as kind of fallible and irrational as any other of the creatures on the planet. So possibly more of a philosophical investigation, but if you want something a bit more kind of factual, well, I learned all about the tastes of different kinds of grass in a pasture and I learned to be a bit of a grass connoisseur.</s>QUEST: Sir, we're very grateful that you're back on two feet. Congratulations, on your IG Nobel. Next time I'm in the U.K., I insist we get together to discuss more about living as a goat. Thank you, sir, good to have you on the program. We'll have a Profitable Moment after the break.