"I always thought everything Freud said was pretty much correct," Robin Abrahams explains, "as long as you replaced every mention of genitalia with hair." Her husband, Marc, laughs in agreement as the two relax with cups of tea in their Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment on a Saturday afternoon. "You know," Robin continues, "hair envy. We're obsessed with our own hair."
Neither Robin nor Marc has particularly remarkable hair, but they spend a good deal of time admiring – and judging – the manes of others. The Abrahamses run the Annals of Improbable Research, a satirical science journal that oversees the annual Ig Nobel Prizes and, most recently, the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists.
The Hair Club started with a dream Robin had in 2001. In it, Robin – a psychologist and researcher at Harvard Business School – was asked to edit a special edition of a prestigious psychology journal. The one stipulation? "Every article had to somehow mention the luxuriant flowing hair of Steven Pinker," the Harvard professor perhaps as renowned for his mesmerizing 'fro-cum-mullet of corkscrew gray curls as for his work in cognitive psychology and linguistics.
When Robin told Marc about the dream, he promptly put a brief mention of it in Mini-AIR, the organization's newsletter. Almost immediately, scientists started sending in pictures of themselves and their impressive coifs. Marc posted these photos on the AIR Web site, usually accompanied by a lengthy explanation of the scientist's hair history. The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists was born.
The first member was, of course, Pinker himself. "In 1969, when I was 15, you couldn't get a date with short hair," he chuckles in his office at Harvard's William James Hall, a 10-minute walk from the Abrahamses' home. "I had battles with my parents about this until, finally, I was old enough that they could no longer tell me how to wear my hair. It's been long ever since!" Pinker sees his own situation as a classic example of prolonged adolescent rebellion, but surmises that the luxuriant tresses of other scientists might be explained by the fact that most of them probably haven't checked what was fashionable since they were grad students. Naturally, he frames this as a "highly testable scientific hypothesis."
Marc Abrahams has his own theory about why researchers have a reputation for magnificent, at times untamed, locks (see Einstein). He postulates that scientists either don't notice their own hair or, as with most things they study, become utterly fixated on it. After all, the club's "historical honorary members" certainly show that luxuriant, flowing hair has been popular with scientists for some time. Abrahams has posted epitaphs of sorts for everyone from periodic-table creator Dmitri Mendeleev ("Liberal and enterprising. Nice hair.") to Sir Isaac Newton ("Inventor of the calculus, and hair like a rock star.").
With a couple hundred members and a few additions each week, the Hair Club has simple guidelines: Nominees must be aware of their nomination (many prefer to delay membership until after they achieve tenure). Other than that, Marc says, "be a scientist. Have long hair. That's all!"
And it's a good thing those rules are in place. Take one man known as Sparky. "If you were gonna put up a billboard to show the world what a bald man looks like," Marc says, "you'd pick Sparky," who requested the formation of an adjunct club for scientists with the antithesis of luxuriant, flowing hair. So is there a Hair Club for Bald Scientists in the Abrahamses' future? "I'd like to have a second club, but there's no point in doing it if it doesn't have a good name, and no one's come up with one yet," Marc says. As Robin adds, "The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists just had a certain inevitability about it."
– Rebecca Milzoff
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Hair Club for Geeks
