French researcher Jacques Benveniste is set to become the first person in history to win two 'Ig Nobel' prizes when this year's awards are announced at a ceremony at Harvard University (8 October).

Benveniste won his first 'lg'-awarded annually by Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbable Research, and a group of scientists-for work claiming to show that antibody solutions retain their biological effectiveness, even when diluted to the point where no trace of the antibody is detectable (Nature 333:816, 1988). The water, Benveniste argues, preserves a "memory" of the substance after it is gone.

The second Ig Nobel Prize will be awarded to Benveniste for an extension of this work. Benveniste now claims that a solution's biological activity can be digitally recorded, stored on a computer hard drive, sent over the Internet as an attached document, and transferred to a different water sample at the receiving end. (see http://www.digibio.com).

"We've demonstrated that you can transmit the biological effect by e-mail between Chicago and Paris," says Benveniste, who heads the Digital Biology Laboratory, in Clamart, France, which is financed by the private company DigiBio SA. "With this approach, you could transfer the activity of a drug by means of standard telecommunications technology."

Benveniste says that he is "happy to receive a second Ig Nobel Prize, because it shows that those making the awards don't understand anything. People don't give out Nobel prizes without first trying to find out what the recipients are doing. But the people who give out Ig Nobels don't even bother to inquire about the work."

(Source:Nature, vol. 395, 8 October 1998)