Answer: Bob Dylan

It started innocently enough. A pair of Swedish scientists, John Jundberg and Eddie Weitzburg, threw a reference to a Bob Dylan song in the title of their 1997 paper “Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind.” A few years later another pair of Swedish scientists, Jonas Frisen and Konstantinos Meletis, did the same thing and titled their paper “Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate.”

The trend could have ended right there but a keen eyed university librarian noticed the two articles and pointed out the parallel Dylan references to the scientists involved. The four of them got together and made a bet: whoever could fit the most Bob Dylan references into their articles before retirement gets a free lunch.

Some years later the researchers are still going strong and the references are piling up; the arrival of the free lunch then, it would seem, is a slow train coming.