Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The morphogenesis of words … it happens in science too!

2016; Wiley; Volume: 83; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/mrd.22629

1098-2795

Gary M. Wessel,

Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research

Googol (yes, I meant to spell it this way) is a noun. More specifically it is a number, and the name was made up by a nine year old. It means the number one followed by 100 zeros. Or ten to the one hundred! And then there is googolplex, where the number is 10 with googol as the exponent! Google is a company whose product is based on an internet search engine, and derived its name from a word for a very big number - one made up by a nine year old. Fanciful! Yet this noun-of-a-company-name has morphed into a verb. Just google it and you will see what I mean! This seems to happen a lot. “Text” also used to be just a noun, but it too has also morphed to a verb - just text me if you disagree. Science has its fair share of morphed words - ironic that a discipline so dependent on specific meanings, words are not immune to mutating. A pipette (derived from the French, “little pipe”), soon became the verb “to pipette” -presumably using a little pipe! I “PCRed” the product successfully … and the list goes on. Such is our dynamic language. But then I was stumped. My spell check would not accept “dounce”. I was douncing something, and had dounced in the past, and I wanted to document how I dounced, but it is not in the dictionary - what?!? Our science is a discipline that takes pride in its terminology! What is the matter, Webster, Oxford, and OED? First I texted others, but they were busy pipetting what they had just PCRed, so instead I googled “dounce”. The lucky hit was for “Dounce” - with a capital “D” … and then all became clear! Urethra - I found it! The Dounce homogenizer is a piece of glass - two actually - and they both look strikingly similar to mammalian “reproductive parts”. The “male” part is T-shaped, with a bulbous protrusion at the base of the T; the top of the T is a handled for the user. It goes into the “female” part, which starts with a bulbous opening that quickly transitions to a long, closed, glass cylinder just wide enough to hold the male part. Sort of like a custom-fit mortar and pestle. One adds tissue or cells to be “dounced” into the female part, and then slides the male part up and down (sort of reproductively) a predetermined number of times. The male part is usually available in a “loose” or “tight” fit for more specific douncing capabilities. Why glass? It gets cold very effectively, you can see the sample clearly, and they break just enough to keep you coming back for more. But why a capital “D”? Answer: We just morphed a person into a verb! Dounce actually refers to Alexander Dounce, who invented this devise to specifically disrupt tissues. Professor Dounce had a long and illustrious career at the University of Rochester Medical Center. His Ph.D. was in organic chemistry (1935), but he deviated somewhat from this track afterwards. Dounce was very successful in crystalizing proteins (catalase was his first); worked with the Manhattan project on uranium poisoning; invented a new method for DNA isolation based on the detergent sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) that we still use today; and helped hone the central dogma in biology that DNA makes RNA make protein - before it was popularized by Francis Crick. Professor Dounce even surmised the triplet codon model, and was glutamine in the RNA Tie club (but that is another story). He also delved into isolating organelles, which led again to inventing a better methodology in 1954, to the homogenizer that now bears his name. The deliberately fine space between the mortar and pestle - 13 microns in his design - was fine enough to break cells and tissues by shear forces, but spaced wide enough to allow organelles to remain unharmed. A standard in homogenization, this tool outlived its investor, who died in 1997 at the age of 87. And just when you thought douncing, excuse me, Douncing technology could not change… we also have Potter-Elvehjem: Teflon-based tissue disrupters. Potter, though, remains a noun; we do not “Potter” anything, although we can Dounce with a Potter! So thank you, Professor Dounce - I will proudly capitalize my Dounce homogenizer, and its morphed douncing process. You know you've made it when your name becomes a verb! Gary M. Wessel