Wednesday, October 1, 2014

"Swedish Scientists Sneak Bob Dylan Lyrics Into Their Academic Publications For Last 17 Years"

From The Local.se:
Five Swedish scientists have confessed that they have been quoting Bob Dylan lyrics in research articles and are running a wager on who can squeeze the most in before retirement.

The game started seventeen years ago when two Professors from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, John Jundberg and Eddie Weitzberg, wrote a piece about gas passing through intestines, with the title "Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind".
 
The latter part of the title is from one of Dylan's most famous tracks.
 
"We both really liked Bob Dylan and we thought the quotes really fitted nicely with what we were trying to achieve with the title," Professor Weitzberg told The Local.
 
The pair decided to stick to the theme and went on to splice other lyrics into their work, including one entitled "The times they are a-changing".
 
"We're not talking about scientific papers - we could have got in trouble for that - but rather articles we have written about research by others, book introductions, editorials and things like that," said Weitzberg.
 
A few years later a librarian spotted an article written by two other medical professors working at the same university and connected the foursome.
 
The title was "Blood on the tracks: a simple twist of fate". It incorporated the name of both a Bob Dylan album and one of his tracks....MORE

HT: the magnificent Open Culture