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aseFirst, I survived volunteering for Oakland Pride. The biggest incident I dealt with all day was Roommate Number Three's long distance text message, "what do you do for multiple wasp stings?" Many sighs of relief all around.
Second, I got to drinking and then I got to thinking: at what point does a blogger need to watch her (or his) words? When do you become a public figure, or a public persona? At what point do you have sufficient following that people will call you out for not checking your facts, or for constructing a spurious or misleading entry? No particular trigger for this, just the powerful combination of bad booze and blog-surfing.
Third, the immunology textbook needs to decide if it's describing immunologically active molecules by location, lineage, or activity first, instead of doing all three at once, badly. If immunologists lock themselves in a conference room until they standardize their nomenclature, that would be nice too. An example:
THE B-CELL LINEAGE
B-cells are named after the bursa of Fabricius, the avian organ in which they first were discovered. B-cells come in several types, named by what they do: naive B-cells hang out briefly and die, like waif-like extras in a horror movie, unless they come in contact with the antigen "key" for their antibody "lock". In that case, a naive B-cell will differentiate into a lymphoblast (rough translation: "blebby white blood cell thing") which will undergo a round or two of classic mitosis (?) before becoming a B-memory cell (named because it "remembers" the antigen) or a plasma cell, which is a (type of?) B-effector cell (what were you thinking immunologists).
How do you know you have a B-cell? One thing to look at are the clusters of differentiation (CDs) on the cell surface. "cluster of differentiation" means "molecule (thingie) on the surface of a white blood cell." Unlike most of immunology, where "naming by doing" reigns, CDs are numbered, in the order they were found. Thus, CD1 is a molecule involved with immune system activation, CD2 makes cells stick together, CD3 is actually several subunits stuck together, and CD4 helps activate T-cells, and shows up in HIV research a lot. What do these have to do with each other? Almost nothing! Astronomy geeks, this is exactly like Messier catalog naming: two intimately related things may be CDn and CDn+20. Two completely unrelated things may be CDn and CDn+1. The CD naming system is almost as infuriating as the "naming by doing" system. There's about 350 known clusters of differentiation in the literature; how many are related to the B-cell that started this rant will be revealed in lecture and reading by mid-December.
It's worth nothing that the patterns of naming show historical trends: early biology is more into the "naming by doing" or "naming by staining" (what it looks like under an optical microscope, after adding dyes; or what dyes stained the cell, making it pop out under the 'scope) and biology after the '60s or '70s or '80s really got keen on acronyms, and then numbers.
The fifth edition of Alberts' Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is so awesome it needs to update only about twice a decade, throws a polite temper tantrum in the preface, then standardizes protein and nucleic acid capitalization for the purposes of the textbook. If only standardizing immunology were so simple.
Second, I got to drinking and then I got to thinking: at what point does a blogger need to watch her (or his) words? When do you become a public figure, or a public persona? At what point do you have sufficient following that people will call you out for not checking your facts, or for constructing a spurious or misleading entry? No particular trigger for this, just the powerful combination of bad booze and blog-surfing.
Third, the immunology textbook needs to decide if it's describing immunologically active molecules by location, lineage, or activity first, instead of doing all three at once, badly. If immunologists lock themselves in a conference room until they standardize their nomenclature, that would be nice too. An example:
THE B-CELL LINEAGE
B-cells are named after the bursa of Fabricius, the avian organ in which they first were discovered. B-cells come in several types, named by what they do: naive B-cells hang out briefly and die, like waif-like extras in a horror movie, unless they come in contact with the antigen "key" for their antibody "lock". In that case, a naive B-cell will differentiate into a lymphoblast (rough translation: "blebby white blood cell thing") which will undergo a round or two of classic mitosis (?) before becoming a B-memory cell (named because it "remembers" the antigen) or a plasma cell, which is a (type of?) B-effector cell (what were you thinking immunologists).
How do you know you have a B-cell? One thing to look at are the clusters of differentiation (CDs) on the cell surface. "cluster of differentiation" means "molecule (thingie) on the surface of a white blood cell." Unlike most of immunology, where "naming by doing" reigns, CDs are numbered, in the order they were found. Thus, CD1 is a molecule involved with immune system activation, CD2 makes cells stick together, CD3 is actually several subunits stuck together, and CD4 helps activate T-cells, and shows up in HIV research a lot. What do these have to do with each other? Almost nothing! Astronomy geeks, this is exactly like Messier catalog naming: two intimately related things may be CDn and CDn+20. Two completely unrelated things may be CDn and CDn+1. The CD naming system is almost as infuriating as the "naming by doing" system. There's about 350 known clusters of differentiation in the literature; how many are related to the B-cell that started this rant will be revealed in lecture and reading by mid-December.
It's worth nothing that the patterns of naming show historical trends: early biology is more into the "naming by doing" or "naming by staining" (what it looks like under an optical microscope, after adding dyes; or what dyes stained the cell, making it pop out under the 'scope) and biology after the '60s or '70s or '80s really got keen on acronyms, and then numbers.
The fifth edition of Alberts' Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is so awesome it needs to update only about twice a decade, throws a polite temper tantrum in the preface, then standardizes protein and nucleic acid capitalization for the purposes of the textbook. If only standardizing immunology were so simple.
