Posted: October 7th, 2007 - 7:08am by Doug Powell

Mayu Yamamoto, exactly as shown, left, accepts her Ig Nobel prize for research that "cannot or should not be reproduced," Thursday night.

Ms. Yamamoto, of the International Medical Centre of Japan, won the chemistry prize in the annual spoofs of the real Nobel awards for discovering that vanillin, the main ingredient of vanilla essence, can be synthesized from a wide variety of herbivore animal dung -- from cows, goats, horses and even pandas. It cannot be made, however, from tiger excrement.

Although the production cost using dung is less than a half of making vanillin out of vanilla beans,  Yamamoto found that her work was ignored by multinational corporations.

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