I'm reminded of how, years ago, Senator Proxmire awarded one of his Golden Fleece awards to an engineer who'd won a big grant to create six-legged walking robots. It sounded foolish, but six-legged locomotion is an essential problem in practical robotics. The Golden Fleece Awards died of their own shortsightedness soon after. The dishonesty of the tobacco industry makes a perfectly viable target for this sort of thing. But any legitimate original research also looks silly when we compare it with things as they are.
Satire is a scatter gun that takes down the guilty and innocent together.
P. J., Presenting the IgNobles, UnPrizes Satirizing Weak Science. The Engines episode on the postmodern hoax is No. 1126 .