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NEWS: Research Team Names Protein After Pokémon's Pikachu

Teriyaki Terrier wrote:

Makes me wonder if Nintendo will try to make this into a copyright lawsuit though.

They did when some guys tried to name a cancer-related gene after Pokemon.

Being and anime fan and a molecular biologist specializing in proteomics, this is so #$%^*@& cool you have no idea!!!

Being a medical student with an undegraduate career that heavily focused on genetics and cell biology, I'll offer the opposite side of the argument and say that these names are unwelcome.

Why unwelcome? Not because I think it's unprofessional or stupid. I like it a lot, actually. It's a great homage, and it reminds people that scientists are people too. And like someone said, it can be fun to see these names when reading papers.

That's the problem: it's too distracting. When a protein has a name like "ubiquitin," that works because it describes the protein (i.e. that it's ubiquitous) and it has no special meaning to the reader. But whenever I read about Hox genes in embryology and Shh (sonic hedgehog) comes up it's always so goddamn distracting. Colleagues agree. Professors agree. The professors who don't find it distracting are the ones who have no idea who Sonic the Hedgehog is. And once they do know, they're the ones you can imagine saying "Wow that's pretty lame." I disagree with them that it's lame, but maaaaaaaan if it's not distracting.

Modern cell biology is faced with the following problem: it doesn't know how to name things. Up until the mid-20th century it was standard practice for people to give chemicals and structures names that were either based on who discovered it (e.g. "Golgi bodies") or based on where the chemical came from (e.g. retinal [a product of Vitamin A] for the retina) or else finally based on what it does (e.g. transferrin, an iron transporter).

Then it became trendy to hate on this tradition and to say "we need to name things according to a universal, unbiased standard of pure mathematics." Hence IUPAC was born and everything began to be renamed. Isopropanol became propan-2-ol. Calcitriol became 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol (and even then "cholecalciferol" isn't IUPAC-derived). Serotonin became 5-hydroxytryptamine. Allantoin became (2,5-Dioxo-4-imidazolidinyl) urea.

And people discovered something by the 1990s: the people who had whined about the random names being too hard to memorize were far and away outnumbered by the people who found those funky and unique names far easier to memorize than the new rigid highly-numeric IUPAC ones. Over the last 15 years the tides have been swinging back to favoring naming compounds for what they do, where they come from, or who found them ...

... but names like Sonic hedgehog and Pikachurin alert us to a novel threat: naming compounds after what they do but with highly-distracting pop culture references. Give it enough time and people will be naming mutagens after the Ninja Turtles and X-Men. I love him as much as the next guy, but I don't want to open my medical texts and see "lgn - Logan" on the same table as Bcr, Abl, Ras, or p53.

Considering you're the first student, faculty member, or corporate researcher in biological sciences I have heard say he doesn't find it distracting, I certainly agree with the "agree to disagree" proposal.

Wow, I am sorry you've encountered so many people with such short attention spans. I can see how that would be frustrating, especially in the science/medical fields. Of course that does explain a lot.

Can you imagine what it's like to tell the parents of a child born with severe holoprosencephaly why their child is severely mentally retarded or even spontaneously aborted mid-term?

Batman3777 wrote:

Wow, I am sorry you've encountered so many people with such short attention spans. I can see how that would be frustrating, especially in the science/medical fields. Of course that does explain a lot.

Now now, mind the sarcasm. We have excellent attention spans, thanks very much, it's just that something like this may not be disorienting to you but it is to many and I am simply sharing that view since it would be a gross misrepresentation for ANN's readership to think that the opinions of a few biology students means everyone in science supports this.

I'm actually surprised you've not met more people who feel the same way as I do considering that those people are all I have ever met: every single college student loved the hedgehog genes at first ("IT'S SONIC! AWESOME!") until we got down and dirty with them and then all I ever heard was how they were the hardest ones to keep straight because knowing he was kept derailing their pnemonics and making them second-guess what the gene really did. People with OCD tendencies would get frustrated that the gene might be associated with certain tissues or embryonic changes that run counter to Sonic's persona (e.g. what the hell does Sonic have to do with neural crest cells? or cancer in adults for that matter?). Accidentally (and highly criticized by the scientific community), it just so happens that Sonic's most recent character designs show what could be argued as a cyclopean face, tying in to the gene's role in holoprosencephaly. Many physicians I have talked with have voiced disdain for the gene as follows:

Quote:

Can you imagine what it's like to tell the parents of a child born with severe holoprosencephaly why their child is severely mentally retarded or even spontaneously aborted mid-term?

This gets back to what someone said earlier on: the POKMON gene was denied by Nintendo because it had a negative association while Sega allowed Shh because (at the time) it had positive connotations. But as has been smartly mentioned in this thread, the chemicals in the human body are rarely used in just one sense or have only one association; there are many possible diseases related to surplus or deficiency of these chemicals and Shh and Pikachurin are no exceptions. One person said "hey this is cool" because Pikachurin relates to fixing retinitis pigmentosa but what about explaining to people in the first place who suffer from RP "I'm sorry, you don't have enough Pikachurin." They'd punch me in the face thinking the next thing out of my mouth was going to be "You failed to catch 'em all."

As soon as I saw the news article, I was thinking how awesome it would be if pikachurin and ZBTB7 were somehow linked.

afterall, what kind of person names a hurricane El Nino (The Boy)?

The name El Niño, from the Spanish for "the little boy", refers to the Christ child, because the phenomenon is usually noticed around Christmas time in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of South America.