Golden Fleece Award

United States Senator William Proxmire, Democrat from Wisconsin, began to issue the Golden Fleece Award in 1975 in monthly press releases.

[11] In 2012 several organizations created the Golden Goose Award, celebrating federally funded scientists doing basic research with benefits to society or humanity.

In his 2014 book Creativity, Inc., Pixar President Ed Catmull wrote of the "chilling effect on research" the Golden Fleece Award exerted.

[12] Winners of the Golden Fleece Award included governmental organizations like the United States Department of Defense,[13] Bureau of Land Management,[14] and National Park Service;[15] research projects have been particularly well represented.

I believe that 200 million other Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don't want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman and vice versa.The Federal Aviation Administration was named for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, including "distance from knee to knee while sitting", and "the politeal [sic] length of the buttocks.

[21] It is widely believed that Proxmire gave the award to a study of the sex life of the screwworm fly, the results of which led scientists to create sterile screwworms, which were released into the wild and eliminated this major cattle parasite from North and Central America, and reduced the cost of beef and dairy products across the globe.

The erroneous claim seems to stem from a speech by a former director of the National Science Foundation, who stated that Proxmire gave the award to an NSF grant titled "The Sexual Behavior of the Screwworm Fly," and later "freely admitted that the study of the sex life of the screwworm fly had been of major significance to progress in this important field.