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the flapperome

it’s not news that scientists aren’t all linguists. but that ain’t no excuse for the nominal slop that pervades biological appelation. perhaps the most notorious of cases, and the subject of today’s exposé, begins in the 1920s: flappers were a dime a dozen, histologists were still arguing over the neuron doctrine, and a forty-something german botanist was coining the term genome. with it, he unwittingly hacked open a pandora’s box of lingual lament, unleashing the phoneme-turned-meme -ome to a world poised to beat it to death. the inevitable ome-philia is now as annoyingly crazy as its shakespearean counterpart; one can only wish it were as self-destructive.

an ome-ome

these days, new *-omes appear daily. perhaps, as colleague dh pointed out in conversation, it’s due to the success of the human genome project, especially as compared to its drunk-in-a-gutter step-brother, the human brain project. here are a few of its more colorful manifestations: the human cytome project, the human epigenome project, the human GNU-ome project, the human Jen-ome project, the american meme-ome project.

the range of possibilities is much greater when it’s not a “human project”: the proteome (coined by mark wilkins, 1995), the metabolome (coined by oliver et al, 1998), the interactome, the transcriptome, the davematthewsome… the list goes on. what spawned my own expl-ome-ation was the new fix that the neuroscience community has with omomics… presenting [drum roll please]… the connectome (PLOS biology article and the obligatory dotcom attempt). it begs the question: what’s in an -ome? surely, people recognize how passé (and strange) it is to affix their favorite subject’s moniker to the -ome suffix: most of these things have nothing to do with chromosomes. but maybe that’s not the real origin of -ome…

et-ome-ology

in the 2 april 2001 edition of the scientist, lederberg and mccray offered a brief but entertaining account of the etymology: ‘ome sweet ‘ome-ics. the authors are iconoclastic enough to suggest that OED gets it wrong. OED suggests that botanist hans winkler, who was the first to use the term in 1920, coupled “gen” from gene and “ome” from chromosome. meanwhile, lederberg and mccray point out three other intriguing, if not all etymologically plausible, facts. 1) there are a number of botanical terms that predated winkler and his cronies in the 20’s, and may have provided more proximate motivation than the term “chromosome”; 2) in Greek, the suffix denotes “having the nature of” ([2], by way of [1]); 3) in Sanskrit, it means “fullness [and] completeness” [1]. beautiful, but winkler was a german at a time when indians were brits… and nobody likes brits.

in the end, skill and passion go hand in hand with the best of science, no matter how it’s dubbed. in that vein, perhaps the old aphorism says it best: ‘ome is where the ‘art is.

UPDATE: see notes from a recent seminar on connectomics (in case you’re still interested).

also see:
[1] Lederberg and McCray. ‘Ome Sweet ‘Omics–A Genealogical Treasury of Words.
[2] Roland Brown. Composition of Scientific Words.
[3] Walter Flood. Scientific Words.
[4] Sporns et al. The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain.