Naming scientific discoveries, as Herschel’s story shows, is not a particularly scientific process. So many forces come into play, including the cultural, the political and the practical. A name must fulfil many functions: it needs to be descriptive, predictive or geographical, or all three. It must be unique and accurate, but universally understood. It must help, not hinder, scientific progress. And it is very often dependent on what already exists. Herschel would have been unlikely to see his star as a new planet because at the time, there wasn’t such a thing.
S
o how do you name a scientific discovery? First, check that you have the right to name it. In botany, the rule of priority applies: the first published name is the accepted one. “This is a principal applied strictly, particularly in the past, and it is still used today,” says Dr Tim Upson, curator of the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. “You might have a plant that has been well known under a particular name, and then someone finds an obscure 17th-century book in German where someone else has published a different name for the same species earlier. According to the rules of priority, we have to change it.” Upson admits, with considerable understatement, that this can be frustrating. So frustrating, indeed, that plant names as well as the plants themselves can now be subject to conservation. If an earlier name is found for a very well-known species, a botanist can make a case for the betterknown name’s continued use. This, says Upson, helps to ensure stability in the use of names, avoiding unnecessary changes. Next, check the conventions for your science. Genetics is a relatively young science – the Arthur Balfour Professorship of Genetics will celebrate its very first centenary this year – and consequently, naming conventions are still recent. Where botany has several centuries of Linnaean tradition to call upon, full guidelines on human gene names were not issued until 1979. Dr Ruth Seal is former literature curator for the FlyBase genetic database at Cambridge. She is now genomenclature advisor to the Human Genome Organisation nomenclature committee at the European Bioinformatics Institute. Dr Seal explains: “Our aim is to give a unique symbol and name to every human gene. Each gene has a full name, which hopefully has a meaning. Ideally within human and other vertebrate species, it should describe the function of the gene. And the symbol is a short-form abbreviation which we encourage researchers to use in their papers so that people can easily search for that gene.” Whimsical names, she says, are not encouraged, particularly in human genes. “We always imagine that at some point, a clinician may need to discuss this gene with a patient,” she points out. “You have to represent the gene and try to describe its function and also be fairly sensible. For example, one gene symbol is PARN, which stands for poly (A)-specific ribonuclease. Because it chews up the poly (A) tail on mRNAtranscripts. That describes what it does in a nutshell.” In other species, however, researchers like to be more descriptive. The tinman gene in drosophila (fruit flies) denotes an organism which has no heart, while methuselah confers longer life. Tribbles, which indicates uncontrollable cell division, was clearly named by a Star Trek fan. Do not, under any circumstances, be tempted to name your discovery after yourself. It is not considered good form. “Though there’s nothing to stop you, technically,” Upson admits. “Apart from peer review … and the scorn of your colleagues.” You may yet achieve immortality through your name, but someone else must confer it. But geographical, predictive and descriptive names, or names that honour someone else, are acceptable. For example, Upson’s team found a new lavender – lavandula – in Morocco. It had divided leaves, so they could have called it pinnata. But that had already been taken. It came from the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco so they could have called it either after Morocco, or after the Anti-Atlas mountains; but these, too, had also already been taken. “So we chose to name it in honour of Professor Mohammed Rejdali, in recognition of his work as an eminent Moroccan botanist on the flora,” says Upson. “It was named lavandula rejdali. And that was a very appropriate thing to do – it was recognising someone from that country. We haven’t always been so sensitive.”
Bear in mind that once your chosen name is in the public domain, it is no longer yours. It can be twisted, criticised or simply ignored in favour of a more media-friendly alternative. Simon Schaffer is convinced that the Large Hadron Collider would never have been quite such front-page news if it had simply looked for the Higgs boson rather than the so-called “God particle”. This was originally known as the “Goddamn particle” because of its elusive nature, but cleverly truncated – not by a scientist, but by the astute editor seeking a title for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman’s book. Professor Shaffer says: “Here we have a story about a large, dark tunnel in Switzerland doing things nobody can understand. And that’s going to be a massive news story for the next 30 months. Who’d have thought it?” Professor Peter Higgs, after whom the ‘Higgs’ part of the Higgs boson is named (the boson being named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose) told a press conference that the ‘God particle’ name was “nothing to do with me. It’s a joke.” But it has become common currency, seeping into the popular consciousness. When the team at CERN announced that the Higgs boson had probably been found, the Guardian ran an online poll asking whether the ‘God particle’ nickname should be abandoned. Seventy-nine per cent of participants said yes; none of the newspapers took any notice whatsoever. And this is the point at which names cease to serve as essential pathways through scientific disciplines. They stop being ways to access and unlock information – and start to be ways of spreading misinfomation. Ask any plant geneticist who has seen his or her life’s work to engineer disease-resistant strains of wheat dismissed as ‘Frankenstein food’, with all the negative connotations that the phrase implies. This is a far bigger problem than the debate over whether or not a genetic researcher should name a discovery after a creature in an episode of Star Trek. “In terms of naming, we all muddle through pretty effectively,” says Professor Alfonso Martinez Arias of the Department of Genetics. “However, I think it is much more serious that the press do not understand the difference between a gene and a mutation, which is a very basic nomenclature issue. And very often, I read about people ‘having a gene for this’ and ‘not having a gene for that’ when actually we all have the same genes – the question is whether we have the mutation or not. “That is a very serious misconception, because if one is not careful, people can start discriminating against those who they claim have ‘a gene for obesity’ or ‘a gene for drug addiction’ when actually it is a mutation. I think there is something quite profound there. These serious misconceptions can set off a chain of events that might lead someone to find themselves in a very difficult position.” Yet we shouldn’t be surprised at the seemingly random ways in which names become assigned, says Schaffer. “Often, we have a very misleading image of the scientific method, which is just our name for what scientists do. We then tend to be surprised or embarrassed to discover that scientists are social groups of human beings distributing credit and trust as accurately as they can, which is something that the rest of us also do.” There’s also a kind of social law, he says, which dictates what names catch on – a law that links together science and the media. After all, the history of Western science developed in tandem with journalism. “The word scientist and the word journalist were invented in the same decade, in London in the 1830s, and probably by the same man, Coleridge. When these two new institutions were invented, a lot of scientists began to discuss extremely explicitly how to name things so that they should be pithy, memorable, and have the right associations. A name didn’t just have to work in the journals, but also the popular press.” And for all its faults, confusions, disagreements and misnomers, sometimes scientific nomenclature simply gets it right. On 6.14am BST on Monday 6 August this year, a NASA rover successfully landed in the Gale Crater on the surface of Mars – the most difficult, complex and challenging rover landing ever attempted. The mission took thousands of man-hours and more than a billion pounds, and may discover evidence that there was once life on the Red Planet. The rover’s name? Curiosity.
CAM 67 17