If you thought science and Bob Dylan don't really go together, you thought wrong. Swedish scientists have been playing a two-decade long game of hide-and-seek using their research and famous Bob Dylan lyrics.
In an epic competition, the scientists have been hiding Bob Dylan lyrics in their scholarly papers in an attempt to find who can conceal the most before retirement.
The competition started after scientists John Jundberg and Eddie Weitzberg from Stockholm's Karolinska Institute published a paper about passing gas called "Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind." They changed a line in the article to read like Dylan's lyrics "the times, they are a-changing."
"We both really liked Bob Dylan and we thought the quotes really fitted nicely with what we were trying to achieve with the title," Weitzberg said. "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," he said.
Hiding the lyrics in the peer-read papers picked up popularity after a librarian told Jundberg and Weitzberg that two other professors from the same university used Dylan references for their article titled "Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate."
Jundberg and Weitzberg then recruited one more scientist, who authored "Tangled Up in Blue: Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era," before opening the contest to others.
While the lyric hide-and-seek is one unique competition, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Kinney highlights all the ways Dylan was not so original when it came to his music in a 2004 memoir. Kinney's "The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob" reveals that Dylan took lines from Mark Twain and many other American classics, adding up to more than 1,000 "citations."
"It's an old thing -- it's part of the tradition. It goes way back," Dylan said in 2012.
For the scientists, their tradition may end someday soon when one of the five retires. The winner of the 17-year contest will receive lunch and bragging rights.
