The political inheritance
at 02:11
Apparently genes get names. I thought they were all numbers or something. And apparently some of them are now a bit, well, politically incorrect. I can understand - if you named one the "lunatic fringe gene" when you discovered it made a fruit fly twitch and now you find the same gene in a human and it controls, I dunno, whether one has a propensity to developing diabetes or something it could get a bit confusing discussing the cause of their diabetes in terms like "you have a problem with your lunatic fringe gene". So...
Rebranding exercise for offensive genes:
The Human Genetics Organisation, which oversees gene naming, is conducting an urgent consultation with scientists to find inoffensive alternative names to genes with titles such as "lunatic fringe" and "one-eyed pinhead".
I wonder if there's a "wing-nut" gene?
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