Dr Charles Foster, a fellow at Green Templeton College, medical law lecturer and practicing barrister, has won a parody biology award in America, a so-called ‘Ig Nobel prize’. Foster lived as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer and a swift, recording his experiences in memoirs entitled ‘Being a Beast’. The work has since received excellent reviews and has been translated into five languages.
Dr Foster outlined his reasoning behind the experiment, describing it as a means of exploring the sensory world. He said, “We have five glorious senses. Normally we use only one of them – vision. It’s a very distorting lens because it’s linked to our cognition. That means we get only about 20% of the information that we can squeeze out this extraordinary world.”
“In an attempt to see woods as the really are without that distorting lens of vision and cognition, I tried to follow five non-human species; badgers, foxes, otters, red deer and ridiculously swifts.”
“It increased my understanding of what their landscape is really like rather than landscapes coloured by our colonial impressions of what those landscapes should be like.”
Foster shares his award with Thomas Thwaites who spent three days living as a goat in the Alps, wearing prosthetic limbs. Thwaites commented, “I got tired of all the worry and the pain of being a human and so I decided I would take a holiday from it all and become a goat.”
‘Ig Nobel Prizes’ are parodies of the Nobel Prize and are awarded yearly to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”, celebrating unusual, trivial or satirical achievements in scientific research. The prizes are presented in Harvard University by a group which includes real Nobel Laureates.
Tom Hall, Magdalen fourth year and former Cherwell editor who has interviewed Dr Foster was delighted at the award, but expressed disappointment that it was shared. He told Cherwell, “I’m a legitimate fan of Charles Foster and it’s fantastic to see his book recognised. His project sounds prima facie ridiculous but actually reveals some important and incredibly serious truths, and that’s exactly what these awards are about. By contrast, the man who lived as a goat for three days is a comparative wannabe and totally unworthy of the prize.”
