Here’s an annoying case of political correctness run amuck.
…the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) Gene Nomenclature Committee…is renaming a number of genes that have potentially offensive or embarrassing names.
The shortlist of 10 genes -Â including radical fringe, lunatic fringe and, bizarrely, Indian hedgehog –Â was compiled in response to physicians’ worries about “inappropriate, demeaning and pejorative” names.
The problem arose because most of the genes were initially discovered in fruitflies, and their names were then transferred to the human versions of the genes, which were discovered later…when applied to the human versions of the genes, many of these names become uncomfortable.
While no one wants to curtail the creativity of fruitfly geneticists, it will be important to ensure that, in the future, no joky names are adopted for human genes where they might cause offence. Other quirky names in the fruitfly genome include headcase and mothers against decapentaplegia (MAD).
Darn prissy physicians. They’ve got no sense of humor. Will they try to rename one-eyed pinhead next? How about half baked? The zebrafish geneticists are just as amusing, you know.
I’d like to know what the physicians are concerned about, anyway. It’s not as if they’re going to be informing patients that their illness is caused by a broken frizzled gene, nor is it going to be somehow better or easier if they rename it “Wnt Receptor X-17” or something similarly dry and empty. I hope whoever started this knows a good proctologist who can do a stick-ectomy.
And seriously, there ought to be something like the priority rules of taxonomy to prevent random gomers from running around changing names just because they don’t like them.
Hilarious. These complaints from the same profession that gave us the medical diagnoses of DIB (dead in bed) and FLK (funny-looking kid). I guess even physicians, some of them, had senses of humor back in the day.
One of my great delights in teaching my Development and Genetics courses is sharing the witty nomnenclature.
Uncle Don
And don’t forget cheapdate!
As someone coming from the prokaryotic world, where genes are named by a rational method (three letter functional abbreviation plus a single letter — you know, like hisA, dnaK, etc.), I have to shake my head at the silliness of eukaryotic researchers — there’s no way *our* system could yield inappropriate names! Oh wait… what’s the abbreviation for fucose? Oh right, “fuc” — and guess what letter some wag decided to use when naming their gene?
What makes those physicians think they can nilly willy change gene names. Are we going around and renaming their equipment ?
One can only hope they don’t speak German or Japanese…
Nice list of names to be found here:
http://jpetrie.myweb.uga.edu/genes.html
If they try to rename “one eyed pinhead,” they better be prepared to deal with ME.
Us Pinheads put family first.
Naming is incredibly important. It is impossible to know in advance which genes will end up as a front-cover story in Newsweek. It would be helpful if some bright scientists got together and decided on naming conventions and perhaps a kind of central registry for names. Maybe you could retain someone from a PR firm to review the list annually or something like that. Sometimes PR is not a scientist’s strong point. .
The attitude that everyone who does not have 12 years of postdoc research in molecular biology is unable to have an informed opinion about anything in the field I think might undermine your ability to reach people who would be inclined to lend support. I understand that this entry was supposed to be humorous, wry, ironic, and was targeted at others in your field; yet as a person with a masters degree in engineering, the tone feels offensive and condescending to me.
We have a common interest, you and I, in making interest in science more inclusive, not more exclusive.And it is not just to drive money into good reasearch, it is to get good policy decisions, decisions formed on the basis of science rathet than faith. Apologies for the rant.
Good thing physicists never have to deal with humans.
Steve: Are you willing to inform us why amusing names drive people away from science? Why do you feel threatened and patronised by some geneticist who didn’t want to name a gene “toe growth promoter”* or other equally banal thing?
Quite frankly, they’ll have to pry my amusing unix command names from my cold dead hands. I imagine astronomers feel much the same with their nebulae and comets. Why on earth is that such a threat?
*Bearing in mind that I don’t do biology and I just made that up…
The random gomers need to take a hike. Half the joy of discovering something and naming it is that it is entirely up to you- and if you want to use up that opportunity on making fun of someone, or making a point, why, it should be your right.
And we might have someone might rename those slime molds that got named for Bsh and Chny.
Yeah, I didn’t spell their names right, I don’t want to validate/acknowledge their existence any more than I have to.
Well, gosh, speaking as a member of the non-scientific general public, I just plain feel a lot friendlier towards a scientific discipline which forgoes jargon like “Wnt Receptor X-17” and instead gives genes names like “one-eyed pinhead” and “Indian hedgehog.” My kinda folks, you know? I wanna read that magazine article now!
Not sure how you get “elitism” out of it.
Dunno about you, but if they take away “ether a go go”, I’m gonna freak out!
There may also be bureaucrats who do not want to release any funds to study one-eyed pinheads…we ran into something like that just trying to buy some software (Gridzo and Surfer–the bureaucrats thought we were buying computer games). But people like that ought to be spanked.
As someone who’s a newcomer to Drosophila research, I must admit that I find the naming conventions rather confusing. I mean, I understand ‘ebony’ and ‘rosy’ (they make a little sense) but ‘cookie monster’? I don’t think we should consider renaming them not to offend physicians, but wouldn’t it be nice to name them something intuitive once we know the function of the gene. I have to laugh when I look at a fly developmental pathway that looks like a genealogy for Sesame Street characters!
Argh. Are we not merely promoting meme selection for thin-skinnedness, here? Correcting for this (marginal) level of offensiveness is absurdly over-sensitive. Good humor is far more important than the risk of offense.
I’ll add my two cents to the ones contributed by Sastra – weird names are definitely far more endearing and engaging than dry, clinical ones. Science should be perceived as fun, not boring. Although I’ll point out that even those dry names can sometimes get absurd and amusing (MAP kinase kinase kinase, anyone?)
The “joke” wears awfully thin by the fifteenth time the seminar speaker has to say “sonic hedgehog.”
Hang on a moment, there’s an opportunity here.
Just like you can name a star and get a certificate and everything, and I think there’s a way to buy a name for a species of flower or frog, why not sell gene names?
“Bill’s Gene controls the brain function responsible for detecting sarcasm…”
Yeah, I like the sound of that. Sign me up!
Oh, no! Don’t tell me doctors have gotten PC!
Many years ago, a best-selling book came out about a young doctor’s year as an intern. Not much sticks in my mind, except this:
On the hospital chart of a pediatric patient, the diagnosis was: FLK. When he asked the resident what “FLK” was, he was told that they hadn’t been able to put a condition to the child’s symptoms and merely entered: [funny-looking kid]…
Seems they’ve grown a conscience in the meantime.
Naomi
I disagree completely that the jokey names are inappropriate. I think they’re much better than someone trying to seriously name them for what they think they do, because they’re usually wrong (pleiotropy, you know). I look at them as random, memorable sequences very loosely tied to the phenotype, nothing more.
Next best strategy is just the boring nomenclature that you get in prokaryotes and stuff like C elegans, but it’s awfully dry, and sometimes it’s hard to remember which lin the author is talking about.
Hey, I used to be a random gomer! Best job I ever had! BTW, keep sonic hedgehog; very cool.
Hey! Some of us are drinking coffee here… my monitor barely survived that one.
Just don’t let them mess with Dickkopf1.
Davidson G, Mao B, Del Barco Barrantes I, Niehrs C. Kremen proteins interact with Dickkopf1 to regulate anteroposterior CNS patterning. Development. 2002 Dec;129(24):5587-96.
Remember when Los Angeles County insisted that computer harddrives no longer be labeled “master” or “slave”?
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/master.asp
My favorite is the team that discovered the dominant suppressor of always early and named it british rail.
Ah, c’mon, the lin genes aren’t that bad; there’s only 67 of them (some since retired, actually, due to double-listing), and I probably know half by heart.
Now the unc or (shudder) let genes, you’d have a point.
What about the POKEMON gene?
Oh, yeah, and the star naming things is a complete and utter fraud. The names are not endorsed nor used by any scientist or scientific organization. The only people who actually respect your name is the company that sold it to you, and even that is questionable. The rest of the world, including the scientific community and competing star-naming companies, will simply ignore it. In reality the only organization that can name stars and get people to use those names is the International Astronomical Union, and they are not in the business of selling star names.
Heck, if you want to buy something for someone, why settle for a star or gene? Go all out and buy them a Number! Stars can blow up, numbers are forever!
The day they mess up Shh or wee1, I’ll quit biology…
PC strikes even within the Drosophila ranks. We must not forget that the original name for a mutant strain where males try to mate with other males was called fruity and then the name was changed to fruitless.
Somebody beat me to ether a go go, but I was also quite partial to male chauvanist pigmentation.
Back in the day when I worked on Chlamydomonas (an eukaryote where the naming conventions do not admit to humor) I got work on the funniest mutant class: flagellaless mutants are called bald. Heee… Good times…
Oh no! Next the PC bots may attack math and physics, other fields known for jocular terminology or paper titles. They may even take the charm out of quark physics – and that will be too strange.
If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are INTELLECTUAL PYGMIES + GOMERS??
Our favourite gene is named sxy. It controls when bacterial cells become competent, and we named it for a hypercompetent mutant (sxy-1; the “sxy one”). You can read more than you ever would want to know about it on my blog (RRResearch). (Luckily there’s no human homolog.)
Lest anyone think C. elegans gene names are *completely* humorless, there’s always him, for high incidence of males. And HSN abnormal migration mutants – ham mutants – are Egl (egg laying defective).
I didn’t say they were funny, just that they weren’t *completely* humorless.
I was always a fan of Sonic Hedgehog Gene. Even the abbreviation is good- “Shh”.
I’ve always been a bit partial to tiggy-winkle hedgehog myself. Next thing you know we will have to stop calling it “the cocktail party effect” because it is too closely related to alcohol…
But there is something to be said for having more uniform and logical names. For instance, we had a discussion about calcium ion channel names. You have L-type ion channels, which are long, T-type ion channels, which are transient. That all makes sense. Then you get into N-type channels, which are neither L or T, they are long but also transient. That would be good if that was all there is, but there are also R channels, which are resistant to the toxins that normally inactivate L and T channels and are somewhere in between L and T, and P/Q for which my professor couldn’t remember what the name meant and are similar to N except they are not found in as many parts of a neuron. There are also multiple channels in each category with different properties. The whole thing is a mess, and he is in favor of scrapping them all and naming them in a systematic manner.
PZ makes the key point. The reason for “frivolous” names is very important: they are either loosely descriptive of the mutant phenotype, or imply nothing at all. What they should never do is imply that you know something about the gene’s function. Meanwhile, we are stuck with all the terrible names from biochemists (and the occasional MD) that cause endless confusion because they are often wrong or misleading. While glycogen synthase kinase 3-beta certainly has been known to occasionally phosphorylate glycogen synthase, this is a small and relatively unimportant function of one of the most interesting signaling molecules around. Better to just call it “shaggy” like the fly people do, and admit you don’t have much idea what important functions it has. Even worse are the genes named after diseases.
TBC makes a good point that systematization makes sense for families of related genes. Ephs and Ephrins were a nightmare until a nomenclature committee sorted it out. However, this can only occur after the literature has gotten to a certain point.
Oh, man, yes…disease genes. BRCA is the most stupid name for a gene yet. I have the “breast cancer gene”, and so do you — the question is whether we have the mutant allele or not. And the name tells me nothing about it’s actual function.
Perhaps the doctors ought to clean their own house first, and purge those.
PZ’s point about memorability is key here. It’s easier for people to remember expressions composed of ordinary words, or maybe ordinary words and a number, than random abbreviations of the same entropy. It’s easier to remember one of the 100,000 most common words in the English language than a 5-digit sequence, usually. It’s a lot easier to remember two words than a 10-digit sequence.
They may even take the charm out of quark physics – and that will be too strange.
Not to mention those perverted top and bottom quarks. Won’t somebody think of the children?
The fun in science allways ends when administrators get into the game.
“Not to mention those perverted top and bottom quarks. Won’t somebody think of the children?”
They’ll rename them “pitcher” and “catcher” quorks. Kids love baseball.
i was always partial to cAMP response element binding protein binding protein.
i’ll take a creative albeit confusing name over something ending in ‘binding protein’ any day. that and the people who insist on compromising about numbers – NT 4/5, anyone?
Oh, man! I love Drosophila-derived gene names because they’re all the cool ones. frizzled is one of my favourites, actually, although I couldn’t tell you why. AKT? Sure, sure, AKT is cool. Lunatic fringe? Now THAT is a cool gene. :D
And then they may go for the poor homo sap.
would these guys also care about amber, opal and ochre. They might be interpreted as anti-semitic.
There’s always the immune surface receptor family of Toll, supposedly so named because the German discoverer exclaimed “Toll” when he/she realized its function. Toll is German for “Cool”.
On another note, the physicians really should look more into their own ranks, because where the real problem is is with syndrome acronyms that the patients might actually hear, and which are named in a ‘funny’ way just for the heck of it. Like the syndrome CATCH 22: cardiac defects, abnormal facies, thymic hypoplasia, cleft palate, hypocalcemia caused by deletion of chromosome 22q11.2. This is a serious congenital condition and you just don’t wanna hear that name as a parent or patient. I think that this syndrome name is not as common as it used to be, but it’s not the only one out there.
PZ – you’re wrong on one point here. I am a physician (clinical geneticist), and I frequently DO have to tell patients which gene is screwed up in them or their kiddie. There *is* the potential to cause offence there.
However, if handled appropriately (as I like to think I do), and especially when the gene naming is explained to the family, I have never had the problem of someone being offended (as far as I know!). In fact, people are often very interested in knowing that the gene that causes the problem in their family was discovered by some bright spark who noticed that some drosophila had funny-shaped wings. So I say keep the names, and keep the informality, but avoid the smart-arse approach when dealing with families. The joke does wear thin with the re-telling (although the british rail gag is superb).
But then we’re supposed to be professionals, and I refuse to believe that if genetic counselling is done correctly that people will feel that there is some cosmic conspiracy to make fun of their malady. Mind you, we did recently drop the term “CATCH-22” for velocardiofacial syndrome (deletion of chromosome 22q11), as people genuinely did find it bothersome.
PZ – you’re wrong on one point here. I am a physician (clinical geneticist), and I frequently DO have to tell patients which gene is screwed up in them or their kiddie. There *is* the potential to cause offence there.
However, if handled appropriately (as I like to think I do), and especially when the gene naming is explained to the family, I have never had the problem of someone being offended (as far as I know!). In fact, people are often very interested in knowing that the gene that causes the problem in their family was discovered by some bright spark who noticed that some drosophila had funny-shaped wings. So I say keep the names, and keep the informality, but avoid the smart-arse approach when dealing with families. The joke does wear thin with the re-telling (although the british rail gag is superb).
But then we’re supposed to be professionals, and I refuse to believe that if genetic counselling is done correctly that people will feel that there is some cosmic conspiracy to make fun of their malady. Mind you, we did recently drop the term “CATCH-22” for velocardiofacial syndrome (deletion of chromosome 22q11), as people genuinely did find it bothersome.
That’s one meaning. Originally “toll” rather means mad or crazy and refers to “Tollwut”, i.e. canine madness caused by Rabies virus.
Like the syndrome CATCH 22: cardiac defects, abnormal facies, thymic hypoplasia, cleft palate, hypocalcemia caused by deletion of chromosome 22q11.2. This is a serious congenital condition and you just don’t wanna hear that name as a parent or patient.
No, but as a useless Usenet know-it-all, it’s quite a useful name.
Roughly five years ago, I was reading a Usenet discussion, and someone asked someone else “Do you even know what a Catch 22 is?”. A week or two later, we had a clinical genetics lecture, and the syndrome was explained. I’m still waiting for that comment to come up again, just to make a really bad joke.
PZ:
I’d like to know what the physicians are concerned about, anyway. It’s not as if they’re going to be informing patients that their illness is caused by a broken frizzled gene
You didn’t check OMIM before you wrote that, did you?
Oh, man, yes…disease genes. BRCA is the most stupid name for a gene yet. I have the “breast cancer gene”, and so do you — the question is whether we have the mutant allele or not. And the name tells me nothing about it’s actual function.
One could apply the same logic to all the “quirky” zebrafish and drosophila names that are based on a mutant phenotype.
Now here’s a cause worth fighting for! Although, I can hardly believe the busybodies. Are medical schools putting up contests in terminally annoying fads? Why can’t they mind their own cabbage? I agree with PZ there’s a necessity of protecting our taxonomy and rights of the discoverers. Has anyone considered yet the insulting translations of almost any jumble of letters in at least SOME of the Earth languages? Can I be sued by a Saudi for mental distress if I tell him his zob1 is defectively spliced?
Scientists, even Drosophila geneticists, sometimes become patients too. Since this stupid campaign is apparently led under the banner of “patients’ rights”, I call on all sick scientists and friends to defend our work and humor.
I’ll believe names hurt people more than their illnesses when I see it.
Why can’t they mind their own cabbage?
Seems to me that they are. Human gene nomenclature is the province of human geneticists and the HUGO nomenclature committee, not developmental biologists who study drosophila and zebrafish. The nomenclature committee isn’t doing anything to the zebrafish or drosophila nomenclature, and they are even proposing to use abbreviations for the human orthologs that retain a link to the nomenclature in other organisms.
I agree with PZ there’s a necessity of protecting our taxonomy and rights of the discoverers.
That sort of conservation of the earliest names has never been a feature of mammalian gene nomenclature. Earlier names for genes or proteins are routinely replaced with newer names (for instance, to reflect membership in a gene family or when a gene is mapped and the systematic locus symbol replaces an informal name applied by the discoverers).
Can I be sued by a Saudi for mental distress if I tell him his zob1 is defectively spliced?
Perhaps for medical malpractice instead, since human ZOB1 does not seem to exist.
Seems to me that they are. Human gene nomenclature is the province of human geneticists and the HUGO nomenclature committee, not developmental biologists who study drosophila and zebrafish.
Which is kind of the stupidity we’re pointing out. The point of any nomenclature committee should be to facilitate accessibility and comparaitve analysis of the literature….not concern themselves narrowly with just one of the millions of species that carry the same gene and give it a special name. One shouldn’t have to be in the club of specialists who know all 17 synonyms for a given gene to browse (or comprehensively search) the literature on it. Gene nomenclature is currently a disaster; human genes are often the worst because people seem to think they need their own special names, which makes no biological sense. The sensitivities of clinicians and the alleged sensitivity of patients is irrelevant. The names need to be maximally useful, which (perhaps ironically) sometimes means conveying the least amount of information. They do not need to be good marketing.
This committee is pushing in exactly the wrong direction… we need fewer gene names, not more. And the name that should be kept in most cases (barring renamings for gene families,etc) is the first one give, regardless of species.
Of course, here we run into the problem of clinicians and biochemists often give misleading names, and the boring nematode names. But I can live with terrible human gene names like “protein associated with myc” (also called “myc binding protein 2,” a protein that has had many different interaction partners and interesting functions, though so far none that have anything to do with myc), just don’t go around taking away useful names with long pedigrees in the literature.
Catchy, memorable, value-neutral mnemonic names are best. Acronyms (usually) and presumed functional names are awful, awful, awful.
Re: voltage-gated calcium channel nomenclature:
“The whole thing is a mess, and he is in favor of scrapping them all and naming them in a systematic manner.”
Actually, there is a commonly accepted systematic nomenclature for voltage-gated calcium channels, which was devised by the international Union of Pharmacology. You can see it here:
http://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/57/4/411