I hold up my first piece of evidence, mitogen activated protein kinase, or MAPK. An easy, self explanatory name you may think, it's a protein, it is activated by mitogen and it is a kinase, yep that is just dandy. But, then you get MAP2K, mitogen activated kinase kinase, a kinase that kinases a kinase!Oooo..kaayyy, a tad confusing and unoriginal but cope-able with. But oh no, we now have MAP3K, mitogen activated kinase kinase kinase.... what the hell!!! That just sounds like an echo!!! A kinase that kinases the kinase kinase!!! what?!! And just to add to the bedlam, your lecturer informs you that sometimes they are known as ERK, or MEKK, gee thanks!
My second piece of evidence comes from the developmental biologist side, Wnt. Wingless related proteins, play a significant part in embyrogenesis. The name itself is silly enough, having no clue as to what its function is, but then we don't just have Wnt, important in the Wnt pathway we have Frizzled protein, and my personal favourite, Dishevelled. I visualise it as a small tramp in a mac.
On the bonus side, the Dev Bios do have Sonic Hedgehog, which I am still impressed about. :-)
Therefore I have made a promise, to myself, and to my peers, if I ever get to the exhaulted position where I discover something, something I can give a name to, I am going to call it Thingy. Or Doo-Dah. Or maybe even Wibble. Something that is easy to remember and refer to. If I discover a signalling cascade, I may even give it sensible names, like Brian, or Richard, or Alan. Brian phosphorylates Richard, which in turn binds to Alan to cause a conformational change.
Yeah, I can see that in a text book of the future! :-)
I'm glad to see someone thinks this is as absurd as I do. May Brian wibble your thingy!
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I think you'd have to exclude the microbiologists, who brought you such gems as Cdang Cdang Coconut Viroid, Phnom Phen Bat virus, and of course, karnal bunt smut :-)
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