Scientists are an amazingly competitive lot. Bestsellers have been written about the race to decipher the structure of DNA, sequence the genome and identify a new solar system.
But another, more amusing race is taking place largely out of the public eye: the scientific effort to find the wittiest names for subatomic particles, species--and especially genes.
Biologists have been the pacesetters in the competition, coming up with such unusual names as Abra cadabra for a clam and Heerz tooya and Heerz lukenatcha for some wasps. But among biologists, the indisputable champions are the somewhat odd researchers who study Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly.
Drosophilists have so far identified more than 26,000 fruit fly genes--in 46,000 variations--and the majority of them have names that will tickle your funny bone.
Cultural references, science-fiction references, literary references, Latin puns and a host of other in-jokes festoon the official archive of Drosophila gene names, found at www.flynome.com. Despite its esoteric nature, the archive is actually a good evening's read.
Sophie Rutschmann of the University of Strasbourg, for example, found a mutated gene that causes adult flies to die within two days after they are infected with certain bacteria. She named the gene Kenny, after the "South Park" character who always dies before the end of the program.
Another group found a pair of genes that cause male and female flies to lack external genitalia. The gene names: ken and barbie, after the dolls with the same features. How about a mutant gene that causes some cells to divide uncontrollably? That gene, of course, is named tribbles, after the classic "Star Trek" episode "The Trouble With Tribbles."
"There is a long tradition in Drosophila research that genes get named in a way that is descriptive and memorable," says Lawrence Goldstein of UC San Diego. "There are some organisms and systems that you name systematically, but that doesn't provide a lot of information about what they are doing or the phenotype [appearance] of the animal. They are hard to remember."
Inventive names make it much more easy to recall what the gene does. Besides, he added, "it's fun. Scientists aren't really that boring."
