AsianScientist (Nov. 18, 2014) – In the Netherlands, a clinical trial is underway to see if fecal transplants, which have been used successfully to treat severe Clostridium difficile infections, will help people lose weight. The trial is accurately, if not elegantly, named: it’s called Fecal Administration To LOSE weight, or FATLOSE.
In her book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, science writer Mary Roach coined the term PLEASE (Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Engineers) to describe abbreviations like FATLOSE. (If you happen to pick up any of Roach’s books, a word of advice—don’t skip the footnotes. These nuggets of gold are often as fascinating and even more hilarious than the main text.) While you could argue that PLEASE is a bit of a PLEASE in itself, it at least only uses the first letter of each word, just as any self-respecting acronym should.
What’s in a name?
Acronyms have a special place in science communication. The need for researchers to be precise in their descriptions often leads to jargon-filled terminology, and abbreviations are essential for keeping things simple in speech and in writing. Some science acronyms have even made it into the English vocabulary as bona fide words—mention “sonar” or “laser,” for example, and no one thinks “Sound Navigation And Ranging” or “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.”
Beyond these practical concerns, a memorable acronym can help scientists promote their work to colleagues, potential employers, and funding agencies, and may also resonate well with the general public. So it’s definitely worth spending some time agonizing over what to name your study, gene, database, or expensive piece of equipment.
Besides, who wouldn’t want a cool name for their work? After spending hours of your life on something, being boring just doesn’t cut it. It’s no secret that scientists have a flair for the fanciful – fruit fly gene names, for example, are the stuff of legend. Acronyms, however, require more effort to get right, and there can be a fine line between clever and contrived. I’ll let you decide if the following qualify as PLEASEs or GREASEs (Genuine REason for an Acronym, Says Everyone). Sorry, couldn’t help it.
CLARITY (Clear Lipid-exchanged Acrylamide-hybridized Rigid Imaging/Immunostaining/in situ hybridization-compatible Tissue hYdrogel), a chemical method for making whole organs transparent, now allows neuroscientists to map complicated neuronal networks in the brain more easily than ever before. Acronym purists may turn up their noses at the use of a second letter of a word, but I think this is a clever condensation that also conveys the essence of the scientific technique.
A more detailed genome sequence of the domestic cat was recently published, in which the authors reported “a preliminary annotation of the whole genome sequence of Cinnamon, a domestic cat living in Columbia (MO, USA), bisulfite sequencing of Boris, a male cat from St. Petersburg (Russia), and light 30x sequencing of Sylvester, a European wildcat progenitor of cat domestication.” In addition to this deeply intimate information about Cinnamon, Boris, and Sylvester, the paper also yielded another gem—the researchers named their gene database Genome Annotation Resource Fields, or GARfield.
Physicists do it best
The physicists who proposed a space time geometry that would make time travel possible became the darlings of Doctor Who fans everywhere when they named it TARDIS (Traversable Achronal Retrograde Domains In Spacetime), after the Doctor’s time machine. One does wonder, however, if the concept was created to suit the acronym, instead of the other way around. (Bonus geek points if it suddenly occurred to you that acronyms, like the Doctor’s TARDIS, are bigger on the inside.)
Physicists and astronomers may have cornered the market on cool acronyms. SAURON (Spectrographic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae) is not an evil eye perched atop a tower, but a powerful instrument for measuring light from distant galaxies, thus providing insights into how they form and evolve over time. Unwilling or unable to stop there, SAURON project researchers also came up with the Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting algorithm (GANDALF) to analyse data collected by SAURON. This is presumably achieved through some sort of mathematical wizardry, which may or may not involve hobbits.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then acronyms are simply bursting with possibility. Abbreviate away!
This article is from a monthly column called The Bug Report. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Harald/Flickr/CC.
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