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Comment by brodney | Hacker News Reader

> On the day the mice were born, scientists injected them with a small molecule known as a sonic hedgehog pathway agonist.

Obviously I had to investigate a gene called Sonic Hedgehog and how it could come to have such a name. From the wiki[0]

>The hh loss of function mutant phenotype causes the embryos to be covered with denticles (small pointy projections), resembling a hedgehog.

I'm glad to see a lack of temerity in a medical article, especially when the results seem so very promising. Nonetheless this is a really great result.

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The silly names almost always start from the fruit-fly community. They have some of the craziest names, but they are usually derived from the resulting phenotype. However, the fruit-fly version is just called hedgehog (hh), because it results in the fruit-fly embryos looking all pointy.

In this case, the funny name was added by vertebrate researchers who ran out of names when they found 3 homologs. The first two were named desert hedgehog (DHH) and Indian hedgehog (IHH). Naming the third Sonic was just too irresistible.

Drosophila names are truly the best.

Contrast that to C. elegans naming: dpy-5, let-37, unc-11, egl-2. The prefix means something ('unc' is uncoordinated) but otherwise very bland.

The names get sillier: there's a sonic hedgehog expression inhibitor called robotnikinin, after Sonic the Hedgehog's nemesis Dr. Robotnik.

I was sure you were joking until

http://www.techtransfer.harvard.edu/technologies/tech.php?ca...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog#Robotnikinin

Does the DSCAM gene (Down Syndrome Cell Adhesion Molecule) fit into this picture at all? This gene is very unusual, as it gets spliced 38,000 different ways with different variants in different neurons, allowing the brain to get wired up correctly. (It's like being able to give neurons in the developing brain labels to keep track of where they go.) Since this gene is in the part of chromosome 21 that causes Down Syndrome, it seems to have an important role in Down Syndrome. But I don't see any connection between it and the current paper.

Any experts who can explain more? When I read about this gene a few years ago, it seemed like a key to explaining how the brain is formed, but I haven't seen much about it since then.

That gene as the wiki article notes is an example of why generally things in the medical community need to be given serious sounding names. No one wants to hear that the thing killing or making their child unwell has a silly name.

On the other hand, you can get so serious that it becomes comical again. Much laughs were had in 5th grade about the endoplasmatic reticulum, out of no reason beyond being a 5th grader. On the other hand, that's one of the only cell parts I still remember.

Even better: I called one of my classmates a homo sapien, he went to the teacher and complained (he thought it meant he was gay) and the teacher said "you are a homo sapien". Ah, 6th grade, good times.

Did this happen in every 6th grade? Or did we both know a guy named Walter?

Nope. that happened in my 6th grade as well. We had particular fun with "homo erectus".

Ha, never heard of anyone else doing this before.

Churchill would have agreed:

"Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be decided by code-words [...] of a frivolous character, such as 'Bunnyhug' and 'Ballyhoo.'"

Those names may be funny, but they are really annoying if you try to do NLP...

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