Love this one:

LITERATURE PRIZE  [USA] The late Dr. William B. Bean, for persistently recording and analyzing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.

From his most rebent paper (1980 PDF):

More than 37 years ago, rather casually, I began to study the rate of growth of my nails, fingernails and toenails. The stimulus that set me on this course I have related in several articles, the first of which appeared in 1953. The kind of pleasure and understanding that I get from studying natural history has long vanished from most contemporary teaching institutions that have become part of intensive care units, which are supposed to save the residual intellectual machinery of medical students. The teeming mass of hope and pain, technical virtuosity, and depersonalization called a “health center” delivers packets of what is termed “medical care.” The capacity to look remains, but the capacity to see has all but vanished. Teachers and students forget that the ability to palpate is not the same as the ability to feel. As a gentle countercurrent, I set forth here this most recent five-year installment of the observations of the growth of my left thumbnail. It is a very long record of the growth of human deciduous tissue. Its duration has little precedent in clinical medicine or human natural history. Still, the nail provides a slowly moving keratin kymograph that measures age on the inexorable abscissa of time