Sometimes I have trouble coming up with things to post on LJ
The other day (week) I was reading about potential drive mechanisms for transgenic genes. The idea is that even if someone came up with a gene that makes something like a mosquito do something like be more resistant to malaria, one would still have to come up with a way to get those mosquitoes to spread that gene through the population faster than by random chance. There are a variety of genetic elements, bacteria, and other assorted things that can do something like that in some other creature, but that's not important right now.
What's important is that there's a gene that they found in flour beetles that has an odd effect. It doesn't do anything in male beetles. In female beetles, it kills any female offspring that do not have that gene. The males are OK (except they carry the gene and will give that gene to 50% of their offspring), the females with the gene are OK (except they carry the gene and will give that gene to 50% of their offspring), and the females who don't have the gene die while they are eggs.
So, some reasonably well-read geneticist named this gene Medea, presumably after the Greek woman who was betrayed by her husband Jason, so killed his new wife and all of Jason's children, including Medea's. The name is also an acronym, for "Maternal-Effect Dominant Embryonic Arrest".
At first, I was a little disappointed. I liked the idea of this reference to Greek mythology just hanging out there to be understood or not. If this is the value of a liberal arts education to the field of genetics, than so be it! I'll keep my copy of Euripides on the benchtop next to the thermocycler. But I was saddened to think that some well-meaning pedant, who perhaps has wholly sacrificed knowledge of Argonauts for knowledge of arginine, had to come along and transform the word from a literary reference (which, frankly, isn't all that obscure, even without Google) and turn it into its own decoder ring.
But then I looked at the elegant redundancy and realized, isn't this a victory for the liberal arts after all? My friend Will took an art class in college where he had to build a sculpture out of its opposite (he made a caduceus out of cigarettes). Medea has been named by its own definition. That's gotta be worth something! It's almost as good as hieroglyphics!
Now I'd like to come up with another example, but it's not happening. I guess I spent too much time in college in biology class.
What's important is that there's a gene that they found in flour beetles that has an odd effect. It doesn't do anything in male beetles. In female beetles, it kills any female offspring that do not have that gene. The males are OK (except they carry the gene and will give that gene to 50% of their offspring), the females with the gene are OK (except they carry the gene and will give that gene to 50% of their offspring), and the females who don't have the gene die while they are eggs.
So, some reasonably well-read geneticist named this gene Medea, presumably after the Greek woman who was betrayed by her husband Jason, so killed his new wife and all of Jason's children, including Medea's. The name is also an acronym, for "Maternal-Effect Dominant Embryonic Arrest".
At first, I was a little disappointed. I liked the idea of this reference to Greek mythology just hanging out there to be understood or not. If this is the value of a liberal arts education to the field of genetics, than so be it! I'll keep my copy of Euripides on the benchtop next to the thermocycler. But I was saddened to think that some well-meaning pedant, who perhaps has wholly sacrificed knowledge of Argonauts for knowledge of arginine, had to come along and transform the word from a literary reference (which, frankly, isn't all that obscure, even without Google) and turn it into its own decoder ring.
But then I looked at the elegant redundancy and realized, isn't this a victory for the liberal arts after all? My friend Will took an art class in college where he had to build a sculpture out of its opposite (he made a caduceus out of cigarettes). Medea has been named by its own definition. That's gotta be worth something! It's almost as good as hieroglyphics!
Now I'd like to come up with another example, but it's not happening. I guess I spent too much time in college in biology class.