My head feels like mush & it’s only Tuesday…
…and it’s just barely Tuesday at that. For whatever reason, the chip in my brain that decides when I go into commando study mode went off today. So now, in my head, beautiful Latin and Greek anatomy names-corona radiata, christa terminalis, ductus arteriousus which becomes the ligumentum arteriosum, cumulous oophorous-are smashing against the molecular cacographic progeny of modern molecular biology Lablish-Sox9, Bone Morphogenic Protein, Sonic Hedgehog, MyoD, PPar-gamma, Nkx2.5.
WHO IN THERE RIGHT MIND NAMES A GENE NKX2.5????
That’s second only to “22q11 Deletion Syndrome” in terms of stupid names.
Granted, Nkx2.5’s precursor, discovered in Drosophila melanogaster, was named tinman because it caused the flies to develop without hearts. I’ll issue poetic license for that, but really guys, really, Nkx2.5?
If we could call up the ghost of Grampa Tolkien, I’m sure he’d tell us that anatomy was named by the Elves and molecules by the Orcs. And I’m not being a totally snide dork here; Tolkien did believe that modernization was separating people from an intuitive understanding of language and hence from beauty in language. I’m intended to agree with Grampa; if we…
Oh, wait, I just realied its 12:30 and I need to get up at 7 to meet with a principle investigator who’s researching pediatric cancer and the resulting surgeries. Hmmm…I wonder…if he invited me to hunt for the gene responsible for glioblastoma which he wanted to name “Dxyfklv3.4-epsilon” would I be upset?
Ahhh, no. I’d do backflips of dorky excitement.
Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably.
Oh, who cares, let’s go to bed.
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