I have always thought of Switzerland as a country where nothing happens - there never seems to be news about the country or its people. It is usually organizations like CERN or the various United Nations agencies who make the headlines, or the inordinate number of Swiss Nobel Prize Winners. The only Swiss that feature regularly in the Indian media are banks, watches and chocolate.

The sentiment is vaguely echoed in (the not entirely accurate) Orson Welles' monologue in The Third Man :

"You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The Ig Nobel Awards are always good for a chuckle, which is what they are awarded for : achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The 2008 awardees lived up to the billing; did you know that

• dog fleas can jump higher than cat fleas?
• armadillos modify history by interfering with archaeology?
• if you are peddling placebos, you should price them higher?
• the lowly slime mold can solve puzzles?
• a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings?
• Coca Cola is an effective spermicide?
• Coca Cola is not a spermicide?

To get back to the subject though, the Peace Prize went to The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the Swiss for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity. Browsing through the ECNH website is revealing : The Swiss Constitution apparently enshrines the concept of the Dignity of Living Beings, and the ECNH translates this concept into concrete terms. For example, the report that earned the award concluded that

• an arbitrary harm caused to plants is morally impermissible
• the instrumentalisation of plants (their use for the benefit of human beings) requires moral justification
• plants are excluded for moral reasons from absolute ownership (majority opinion)
• genetic modification of plants should involve conservation of natural relationships (majority opinion)

The very notion of ethical considerations around animals and plants is (pleasantly) surprising to me. Quite a few people on the planet still have trouble applying ethics to human beings.

Tags : Ig Nobel Switzerland Ethics