I was reading a paper recently which had an awkward acknowledgements sections and I thought it might be fun to make a collection of papers with unusual such sections. So I am putting out a call here – do people know any good examples of strange or funny or exceptionally long or otherwise interesting acknowledgement sections from papers? Please post them here or on twitter/friendfeed and I will eventually post a list
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
“Sincere thanks to Enrico Bernard, Brock Fenton, Moe Gregory, and John
Ratcliffe who graciously provided blood samples.”
Gregory, TR. (2000). Genome 43: 895-901.
Moe being my cat.
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Where's the example of the awkward acknowledgements section you read, Jonathan?
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I once thanked Howard Ochman for 'pharmacological support' on a theory paper (in Nature!). He had given me a pound of excellent coffee beans.
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“We thank John R. Rohde and Raphael H. Valdivia for helpful comments, and R. Siffredi for constant support.”
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1000005#ack
If you don't wee what's funny about this acknowledgement, google “Rocco Siffredi” 🙂
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“I thank the National Science Foundation for regularly rejecting my (honest) grant applications for work on real organisms (cf. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1972), thus forcing me into theoretical work.”
Van Valen (1973). A new Evolutionary Law. Evolutionary Theory 1:1-30.
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How about this one by Olin Shivers:
http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html
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My dad tells the story of his late colleague Ken Eskins. Ken won an argument with an editor who was skeptical of a result, and in the end, Ken's article got published. In Ken's very next experiment, he proved himself wrong. The follow-up article included phrases like “Recently we reported what appeared to be…” and “In the present study we attempt to resolve that problem….”
The best part of the article, though, is the acknowledgements section: “The authors wish to thank Edith Crowe for helpful work in establishing equilibrium conditions.”
Eskins, K., McCarthy, S. A., Dybas, L. and Duysen, M. (1986), Corn chloroplast development in weak fluence rate red light and in weak fluence rate red plus far red light. Physiologia Plantarum, 67: 242–246. doi: 10.1111/j.1399-3054.1986.tb02450.x
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I acknowledged everything under the sun in my thesis (including the commodore 64).
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