Those weird scientists and their crazy names

Strange names?

Eh, mathematics wins as long as we've got the Slothouber-Graatsma puzzle.

I wonder how the day had gone so far for the geneticist who named a drosophila gene "faint sausage" LOL !

Two genes I could not find there: RING (really interesting new gene) and the abbreviation for the FUC kinase...

Speaking of names and how to get rid of them. To be fair, I doubt I'd be able to tell sponges apart, myself.

Re maths: One day I want to understand what a Killing field is.

John Epler has long had a list of "interesting" taxonomic names at his website for Chironomidae and Aquatic Beetles of Florida:

http://home.comcast.net/~johnepler3/names.html

You may also enjoy Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names, which demonstrates that chemists, too, have a sense of humour.

Xanthopan morgani praedicta

What a splendid story:

In The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects (1877), Charles Darwin described an orchid from Madagascar, Angraecum sesquepedale, whose flowers have a spur almost 12 inches long, with all the nectar at the bottom. He hypothesized that, for the plant to be fertilized, "In Madagascar there must be moths with proboscides capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches! This belief of mine has been ridiculed by entomologists..." (On the Various Contrivances Whereby British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing, 1877). Alfred Russel Wallace had also predicted its existence in Quarterly Journal of Science (1867). In 1903, this subspecies, with a 12-inch coiled tongue, was discovered as predicted.

Not so much a strange name as a terminology accident:

There's a probably-apocryphal story from physics, in the days before word processing, about a secretary who typed up a high-energy paper, "correcting" every instance of the word "hadron" by transposing the r and the d.

Epikt,

So the Super Hadron Collider becomes a gay porn movie?

I really liked Turdus.

Kinda rolls off the tongue, as in: Kent Hovind flounts his turdus degrees...

There's that newly named Neilyoungi spider...
Namicus Crazillium...

~Dan
http://jazzsick.wordpress.com/

Look, I found something, I want to name it after ME!

CalGeorge

Careful what you wish for

Corydoras narcissus Named "narcissus" because the discoverers insisted that the describer name it after them.

Binomens do I find those amusing.

I like the fact that there really WAS a creature from the Black Lagoon:

Eucritta melanolimnetes Clack, 1998 (fossil amphibian) Loosely translates as "Creature from the black lagoon" [Nature 394: 66-69].

It doesn't get better than that.

Here's another great list by Paul May at the University of Bristol. Now where did I put my beaker of moronic acid...

My biology professor didn't manage to get Fordia cortina through the naming committee, however the engineering group I later worked for managed to publish a research document with a long list of authors that terminated "T.Cobley et al." For non UK people, that's a reference to the folk song "Widecombe Fair" which has a long list of people who attended, ending with the aforementioned Uncle Tom Cobley.

It's a long-standing tradition in astronomy that comets are named after their discoverers. Also, if you discover a new moon or asteroid, you're allowed to name it. The rules for asteroids are quite relaxed, which means that many of them are named after the discoverers' friends or colleagues.

Planetary moons, on the other hand, can't be named after real people, living or dead. Nor, alas, can they be named after well-loved pets, which prevented Professor Phil Nicholson of Cornell University from naming a new moon of Uranus that he and his colleagues discovered in 1997 after his pet cat Squeaker.

Let us not forget the owl louse named after every biologist's favourite cartoonist: Strigiphilus garylarsoni

Drosophila Genes! Where are nudel and gurken?! They do go with windbeutel after all! Anyway, the page is awesome!

Drosophila Genes! Where are nudel and gurken?! They do go with windbeutel after all! Anyway, the page is awesome!

I'm surprised that a couple of other mathematical curiousities hadn't yet popped up:

The Cox-Zucker Theorem (please be careful with your pronounciation:

The paper is available for $32 from Springerlink - but, as I think they grossly overcharge for their papers, I won't link to them.

And the Hairy-Ball Theorem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem

cheers-
Eric

I'm surprised you didn't make a special note of this one: Vampyroteuthis infernalis Chun, 1903 (squid relative) "Vampire squid from Hell"

translates as "Creature from the black lagoon"

The melanolimnetes part does translate as "from the black lagoon". The -critta part is English critter, and the Eu- part means "real".

Too bad it's an almost unidentifiable larva. No, it's almost certainly not an amphibian, it's probably a baphetid (...whatever that is).

My biology professor didn't manage to get Fordia cortina through the naming committee

What do you mean by "naming committee"? The editorial board of the journal? Couldn't he have published elsewhere?

Genes: decapentaplegic, mothers against decapentaplegic, SUPERMAN, KRYPTONITE.

Vampyroteuthis is closely related to the octo...podes.

F*&king Drosophila genes, I hate them all. Seriously, Drosophila geneticists make the rest of the biology industry look bad. Can't they give anything non-stupid-sounding names? Of all the shitty gene names, 80% are from Drosophila, and another 10% are genes with homologies to those found in Drosophila, and thus are forced to have related names.

Seriously, Drosophila geneticists make the rest of the biology industry look bad.

I remember where someone sent in to New Scientist a snip of text about some sort of genetics (Drosophila is likely), where everything is about genes, then they're talking about "hedgehog". And it just seemed bizarre to the person, and also to the person trying to answer the question.

Well, of course it's a gene, and I did know that (I'm not a geneticist, but I read the stuff). But I could see the problem, as it would have stymied me earlier as well. So sure, someone else wrote in and told them what "hedgehog" was.

Really, though, even a reasonably educated layperson tends to get lost in that horrible jargon, as the person at New Scientist did. Exactly why they have such nonsensical nomenclature, I don't know (yes, I understand where many of the names came from, the problem is that they don't relate generally meaningful information). They've actually been cleaning up some gene names, and their variants, but only so that people who have a mutant form won't be embarrassed by the name of their condition.

I wonder if at any time they'll change names so that they'll be relevant and meaningful. The weird and sometimes humorous species names are rarely, if ever, much of a problem, while the bizarre names of genes continue to limit communication (possibly slightly disadvantaging attempts to explain evolution, even).

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

If PZ read through the entire site, I know what his Friday Cephalopod will be: "hectocotylus, Some male cephalopods have a long coiled arm which carries a spermatophore and breaks off inside the female during copulation. When first discovered, it was thought that this arm was a type of parasitic worm, and it was described as such (Delle Chiaje, 1825), complete with drawings of the imagined internal anatomy. The author later admitted his mistake. This name continues to be used today for the modified reproductive arm of male cephalopods."

No, no -- the weird names are perfect. I detest the serious sounding names that try to describe the function of the gene, because they are always wrong and dangerously misleading. I also find the mechanical sounding names like the C elegans community uses almost impossible to sort out (how many lin-X mutants are there, anyway?)

Whimsy is good. It puts a memorable label on a gene, but doesn't bias the interpretation of function unduly.

Indeed; don't forget the relative of hedgehog, sonic hedgehog, named after the cartoon/game character Sonic The Hedgehog. Apparently the discoverer went by a display about it shortly after coming across the gene and thought "that's what this gene is - sonic." And of course it turns out that sonic hedgehog is one of the biggest master genes in development.

I detest the serious sounding names that try to describe the function of the gene, because they are always wrong and dangerously misleading.

They wouldn't have to be descriptive, just relational in some manner.

In anatomy, the decided trend has been away from eponymous terms toward more relational ones. I don't have any data regarding it, but I would certainly wager strongly that people have been learning terms, and understanding what their physicians tell them, better than they did with the many eponymous names.

To be fair, anatomy is discussed with laypersons more than is genetics. Otoh, genetics-speak is likely to become increasingly important in healthcare, and I do not think that the current names will facilitate understanding.

Well, that's how I see it, and my opinion isn't likely to make much (if any) difference. You'll probably have your whimsical names for a long time, and it won't trouble me.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

@11 -- and its cousin trapdoor spider, named for Colbert. Of course, he hasn't decided which of the 27 spiders in need of a name is going to be his yet, because he hasn't had time to fully investigate which has the coolest mating clasp.

These slime-sucking beetles (or, rather, myxomycetophages) deserve some recognition:

Agathidium bushi Miller and Wheeler
A. cheneyi Miller and Wheeler
A. rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/april05/slime-mold.bush.cheney.ssl…

Here is the granddaddy of taxonomy pun sites: http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/taxonomy/taxPuns.html

Chemical names too (someone already pointed to this): http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm
(Hmm. "Moronic acid"! "Spamol" "Constipatic acid": What would you call their ester? "Spamyl Constipate"?)

But in every field, there are a few fun names that are so obscure they have to be explained to outsiders, like Edithcolea. What country does Lobivia come from? Why are Quercus and Fagus so closely related? "What kind of cactus izzat?" "Notocactus." "'Looks like one though."

Hey, Earl,
Cedar Redwood?
What's it Fir, Doug?
Jist ter Spruce up th' place.

Hey, Earl; I just saw an Arundo!
What KIND of Arundo?
Don-ax!

And personal sentimentals: "Bulbophyllum barbigerum" was always my 3-yo daughter's response to "what is your favourite flower?" and got her some interesting looks. I refuse to ever surrender Echinofossulocactus zacatecasensis into mere junior synonymy! It was one of my first plants, one of my first Latin words.

In Engineering, we have lots of amusing "terms-of-art" too. How do you pronounce EEPROM?

What about,

Parnassius apollo antijesuita

that's really nice naming a butterfly AGAINST THE JESUITS !

I can't find much via google, apart from this reference in the "Butlletí de la Institució Catalana d'Història Natural" (that's actually just home, I'm in Barcelona, how funny)

-Das Weibchen von "Parnassius apollo. f. antijesuita" Bryk. H. Belling
Vol 22, nº1-2, p.46-47 article by Codina i Ferrer, february 1922

that's really nice naming a butterfly AGAINST THE JESUITS!

I've heard that was a compromise, after their first suggestion - Parnassius apollo mortaljesuitaialespanyoliviscacatalunyalliure - was rejected. :)

Am I the only one geeking out over the frazillion Nabokovian references? So much <3.

I wonder why nobody has ever thought of naming a species

....... anticreationista

would seem the most logical thing to do.

aaaaaah my harts iz gone it et my hartz

I meant to say: Am I the only one geeking out over the frazillion Nabokovian references? So much lessthanthree.

The chap who named the slime-mould eating beetles really likes them, and is also a Republican, so he at least, did not intend it to be an insult.

Nabokov as well as being an author was also a lepidopterist, and published a couple of monographs.

I was hoping this might be about oddly named scientists, similar to the ophthalmologist in my town whose name was Dr. Strain . . .

I have to agree that genetics has, even by the notably relaxed standards of biological science, a bad case of jargonitosis. However, what bugs me more than the likes of sonic hedgehog, which while unhelpful is at least easily remembered, is the superabundance of unpronounceable and inscrutable abbreviations and initialisms.

They wouldn't have to be descriptive, just relational in some manner.

Like MAPKKK?

(That's "MAP kinase kinase kinase", with MAP being the only "mitosis-associated protein" out of 3.9 gazillions that is called one. The name MAPKKK describes exactly what the protein does: it phosphorylates MAPKK.)

The chap who named the slime-mould eating beetles really likes them, and is also a Republican, so he at least, did not intend it to be an insult.

That's what he says! Or at least what he said in 2003.

the superabundance of unpronounceable and inscrutable abbreviations and initialisms.

Like the genes necessary for the sporulation of Bacillus subtilis. I was once supposed to learn about half of them by heart, and also what they do. They all have names like spo0F, spoIIA1, spoIIIG, spoVIIA... "spo" is for sporulation, the Roman number (or 0) is for the phase of sporulation in which they are active, the letter behind that is given in the order of discovery, and the number at the end of spoIIA1 presumably means that spoIIA was later discovered to be two proteins rather than one.

Genes are usually named for what happens to the phenotype of the organism when they mutate, not for what they do in the wildtype at the molecular level.

However, what bugs me more than the likes of sonic hedgehog, which while unhelpful is at least easily remembered, is the superabundance of unpronounceable and inscrutable abbreviations and initialisms.

That's how the dull descriptive names become wretched impediments. Someone gives a gene a name that clearly was never "intelligently designed" (notably, too long for regular use), just a description with no thought of making it so that a usable acronym will arise. I mean, some do, some don't, so that while there are good acronyms out there, in many cases it's all just incomprehensible code which has no meaningful generalities governing it.

I don't know if "sonic hedgehog" is memorable, at least to those of us who know nothing about the comic. I do remember it, and hedgehog, because these are so commonly referred to in developmental genetics.

Sometimes families of genes are rationally named, if not otherwise very helpfully named. Besides that, it seems that it's pretty much a hodgepodge. The totality is much like any evolution, clunky names are conserved because names are needed to maintain funcationality, while rationalizing the whole matter seems unlikely until and unless some intelligent designer comes along and changes it all. It is conceivable that rationality will take over someday, but until then the naming system will be largely analogous with the evolution of the genes themselves, contingent and with little (none for non-engineered genes) rational intelligence observable.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Genes are usually named for what happens to the phenotype of the organism when they mutate, not for what they do in the wildtype at the molecular level.

That's one reason why genetic nomenclature isn't very rational. It's understandable why they're named for the mutation, it just doesn't relate much beyond a particular stint of research (to be sure, you know that).

Sheesh, "MAP kinase kinase kinase". Still, that's not a bad name, because MAP is memorable and pronounceable, and based upon what it does (relational), while "K" is pretty obvious to anyone who knows anything about enzymes. Just tack them on.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

@Faithful Reader

My childhood dentist was Dr. Chin, and my gradeschool nurse was Nurse Payne.

No joke.

Whimsy is good.

It is also used to let of steam, and perhaps to point out that the area isn't populated by total nerds. In physics I don't think there is much funny terminology outside particle physics (e.g. quarks, wimps, et cetera), but the papers can get whimsical headings.

For a classical but rather laid back example, take the famous αβγ (Alpher, Bethe, Gamow) paper on nucleosynthesis, where Bethe was enlisted to make an author pun. (Alpher was a student to Gamow at the time, and Gamow had discovered the tunneling mechanism of alpha decay in his early work.)

The close fit of the calculated curve and the observed abundances is shown in Fig. 15, which represents the results of later calculations carried out on the electronic computer of the National Bureau of Standards by Ralph Alpher and R. C. Herman (who stubbornly refuses to change his name to Delter.)

There are many more and funnier examples in the arxiv collection.

While the resulting "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory" is fun, I really like the whimsy of "big bang theory". Famously penned by Hoyle [yes, that Hoyle] to mock such cosmologies.

The complaint about the frivolity of gene names have been noted before: K. Maclean, 2006, "Humor of gene names lost in translation to patients," Nature 439: 266. The title gives the gist of the letter.

Incidentally, Vampyroteuthis infernalis is listed on the "Interesting Translations" page.

I don't know if "sonic hedgehog" is memorable, at least to those of us who know nothing about the comic. I do remember it, and hedgehog, because these are so commonly referred to in developmental genetics.

As a general thing, it's easier to remember pronounceable words than random sequences of letters.

I used to like getting a bit of the history when learning chemistry, but if you shout name reactions at me today (just ... five years later) I most likely would just stare at you incomprehendingly.

Draw me some fragments, though, and I'd most likely still be able to push around some electrons.

For instance I cannot remember the name of the rule for addition of electrophiles to alkenes. But I know how it works (and I still recall the lecturer reading to us from the Parable of the Talents: "To he who has shall more be given." - Now that's effective teaching).

MAP is memorable and pronounceable, and based upon what it does (relational)

As I mentioned, it's the only mitose-associated protein that's called "mitose-associated protein", out of hundreds upon hundreds, and that name doesn't tell us it's a transcription factor (...hmmm... I think that's what it is).

As I mentioned, it's the only mitose-associated protein that's called "mitose-associated protein", out of hundreds upon hundreds, and that name doesn't tell us it's a transcription factor (...hmmm... I think that's what it is).

Well, no, but correlation does tend toward causation in biology, and I took liberties. Thought about mentioning as much in a subsequent post, but it didn't seem worth mentioning.

Still doesn't.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

There's a genus of clams called Abra, with many fossil species. I heard of one guy who had to wait several years to discover a fossil species, which he immediately dubbed Abra cadbra.

Then there was the Tolkien fan who described a pallid slug that lives in anoxic mud under rocks and named it Smeagol gollum. Apparently distinct enough to warrant its own order, the Smeagolida.

Damn. Abra cadabra (typing this on a laptop with very stiff keys...)

I didn't see this one listed by anyone, sorry if I missed it.

Trapdoor spider is named after Neil Young - Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi...a bit ironic it is native to Alabama.

True Bob #7: A splendid story indeed. I love it.

It must be among the earliest examples of the explanatory power of that new-fangled godlessly sacrilegious new guiding principle of evolution, in the form of that horrid 'natural selection' mechanism/theory thingy.

Since then, an ever-increasing flood of the same sort of thing.

How can the sanctimonious religious/creationist louts account for this bizarre circumstance? How can this be that so many independent workers not only independently confirm each others observations, but that so many independently come upon the very same PREDICTIONS that later turn out to be so on the basis of such confirmation? Is all of this scientific delusion a result of some relentless satanically-inspired nightmare of coincidence?

But then, they're not well acquianted with what scientific excellence requires - like an abiding habit of observing with a perspicuous eye alert to patterns in the real world, a respect for what other scientists have previously uncovered, not to mention a knowledge of what the scientific method is all about. That kind of discipline is utterly foreign to them.

What the louts ARE good at is quoting Chapter and Verse...then making up whatever interpretation pleases their truncated aesthetics and rational sense as sounding most authoritative.

Scientists supply reams of references acknowledging supporting research. On the other hand, anti-evolution Creationist/IDiots (who never need to produce any research, because it's already all been written out, complete)have but ONE reference, and they refer to it because they are psychologically dependent on the fancy that they ARE GOD.

The towering arrogance and conceit behind this preposterous presumption - that they can speak for what they are pleased to identify as the "Almighty" - is more than adequate to keep them yapping indefinitely.

Talk about WEIRD...another story from the site:

Cypraea isabella Linnaeus 1758 (Isabella's cowrie) Linnaeus named this parchment-colored, brown-streaked shell after the color "Isabella." The color was named after Archduchess Isabella of Austria, who vowed not to change her underwear until her father, Philip II, won the siege of Ostend. The siege lasted three years.

"As of 1993, the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope is the type specimen for Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758. Robert Bakker formally described his skull, and it was approved by the ICZN."

That, friends, is immortality.

Crud is a specific technical term in nuclear engineering. One of the first civilian pressurized water nuclear reactors was at Clinch River, Tennessee. The engineers there noted a buildup of solid deposits in coolant water. They wrote a series of papers on Clinch River Unidentified Deposits (CRUD).

Crud is primarily cobalt, iron and nickel which precipitates from the tubing in which the coolant water circulates. Crud becomes highly radioactive. When coolant pumps are speeded up, there's often a "crud burst" with a concurrent rise in radioactivity in the coolant system. Dealing with crud is a major concern in reactor design and operation.

This reminds of the story of Cardinal Sicolla, who was, at one time, thought of as a contender for being the next pope.

But nobody liked the sound of "Pope Sicolla".

Don't try the veal...

One of the professors at my university named a gene his group had found "Sushi" because they found it in puffy fish, rice and seaweed.
They also discovered something called a Zorro element. When we asked where they got the name Zorro from he replied, "None of us can remember, there was a lot of drinking involved."

Nobody's mentioned Copper (Cu) or Bismuth (Bi) Nanotubes (NT).

I have some doubts that the skull Bakker described is Cope's. Cope had syphilis, which eventually attacks the skull and other bones, leaving distinctive marks and holes.

I think whimsical names are perfectly fine. It's not like the organisms care what we name them, after all. What interests me more is the debate over purchasing names, which is an idea that seems to have gotten more prominent in recent years. On one hand, it doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff to agree to name something after a person if they bankroll all of the research. On the other hand, it's crass and base and counter to almost all traditions of naming. Even in ye olden days, people were more likely to name organisms after prominent researchers in that field rather than their patron.

Re Cox and Zucker: there's a paper that refers to it not as a theorem but as "The Cox-Zucker Machine". Not sure we biologists can beat that one. You can find a pdf of it here, along with a summary of the original Cox-Zucker algorithm.

Planetary moons, on the other hand, can't be named after real people, living or dead. - David Harper

Nor can planets of course, these days. Herschel actually called the planet we know as Uranus "the Georgium Sidus", after George III. Bode (he of Bode's Law) suggested "Uranus", but this didn't become generally accepted until around 1850. What opportunites for low-grade humour would have been missed in more recent times, when "the rings around the Georgium Sidus" were discovered.

What interests me more is the debate over purchasing names, which is an idea that seems to have gotten more prominent in recent years.

Capitalism strikes again. In a similar vein, it's only a matter of time before venerable Fenway Park joins the rest of the professional sports/entertainment arena world as Corporate Sponsor Park. The TD BankNorth Garden or whatever it is (home of the Celtics and Bruins) was selling off its name on a daily or weekly basis a couple of years ago. Weird, yet annoying.

"We've already established what kind of lady she is..."

"As of 1993, the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope is the type specimen for Homo sapiens Linnaeus, 1758. Robert Bakker formally described his skull, and it was approved by the ICZN."

Er... no. The type specimen is Linnaeus himself, who lies in a cathedral in (I think) Uppsala.

Yes, at least his tomb is in the Cathedral of Uppsala according to the material behind Linnaeus tricentennial last year. (That cathedral is the seat of the Swedish Archbishop, btw.)

And in fact IIRC you can see the tomb stone in the floor. (But my memory could be wrong, I was just sightseeing.) [Added before posting: Well, duh, why bother to remember when Wikipedia has a photo of the tomb stone.]