A funny reward

I was recently among the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize awarded at Harvard University, awards for research papers that first make you laugh and then make you think . The work was invented and performed by my younger colleagues, and my role was mainly boiled down to the fact that when they came to me with an idea, I didn't knock my forehead, I said, do, research, just do it properly! And they did! I helped a little with editing and the work: Jasiński M, Maciejewska M, Brodziak A, Górka M, Skwierawska K, Jędrzejczak WW, Tomaszewska A, Basak GW, Snarski E. Ice-cream used as cryotherapy during high-dose melphalan conditioning reduces oral mucositis after autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Sci Rep. 2021 Nov 18; 11 (1): 22507. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-02002-x. PMID: 34795377; PMCID: PMC8602377. appeared in the journal Impact factor almost 5 and was noticed overseas.

This story shows that you don't always need a lot of money to do an interesting job: that it's a bit like Niels Bohr once said: "Gentlemen, we don't have any money, we have to start thinking."

Melphalan in mega-doses (200 mg/m ² is used in hematopoietic cell transplantation) causes very severe mouth ulcers as an adverse reaction. Ulcer formation can be prevented by administering a keratinocyte growth factor, but it costs more than half of the entire transplant refund. At the same time, it is a drug that has a very short duration of circulation. It has already been noted that a similar effect can be obtained by advising the patient to keep an ice cube in their mouth while the drug remains in the circulation, but this is also not very pleasant. Our work combines useful with pleasure, because who doesn't like ice cream? The more so because you could choose the type of ice cream.

It was the first time an Ig Nobel prize was awarded to a work by Polish authors made in Poland. We just hope that the tax office will not charge us with the gigantic ten trillion dollars (Zimbabwe) tax that we received as a Prize.

P.S. I recommend everyone to watch the report on the presentation of these Awards on the Internet. Just enter Ig Nobel 2022.