Month: August 2025

What Are The Top 10 Funniest Gene Names?

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 5 Comments

In my experience, scientists as a group are generally pretty funny people. I realize that’s probably counterintuitive for some folks, but its a hill I’m willing to die on. Whether we are talking about an Ig Nobel or someone making their cat a coauthor, scientists niche interests and quick wit can really kill with the right crowd.

By far the group that takes this to another level is geneticists, particularly fly geneticists. I have yet to determined if fruit flies are just great joke writers, or if this developed as some sort of coping mechanism to deal with having to work in a fly facility. What I do know is that they love a funny or clever gene name.

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The Curious Journey from Heart Transplants to Pig Lungs

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / Leave a comment

Today, while cruising my Facebook feed, I encountered a truly incredible story. Science ran with the provocative title “In a first, pig lung survives and functions—briefly—in a person.” This covered the most recent study from Nature Medicine by the surgeon Jianxing He and his colleagues. The patient, was 39 year old male who had suffered an intracranial hemorrhage which had resulted in brain death.

In short, a genetically engineered pig lung, designed to survive in humans, was transplanted into this brain-dead patient. Instead of dying in hours these genetic modifications allowed the patient to stay alive with functioning lungs for 9 days. The patient was seen to be delivering oxygen and clearing CO₂. Eventually, after a problematic immune response, the lungs were removed for further study. The man was ultimately taken off life support in accordance with his families wishes.

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Blondlot’s Folly: The Science of Seeing Things

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot announced something extraordinary: a brand-new form of radiation he called “N-rays” after his home base at Nancy University. According to Blondlot, these mystery rays could make a barely visible spark a little bit brighter.

Soon, French labs were identifying N-rays everywhere. Possible sources of N-rays included:

  • A specialized gas burner called a WeIsbach mantle
  • An incandescent lamp called a Nernst glower
  • Heated silver and sheet iron
  • The sun
  • Living and dead bodies
  • Nerves
  • Muscles
  • Isolated enzymes

This list of sources remains so broad and varied one starts to wonder what couldn’t produce N-rays. The only limitation seemed to be imagination. By 1906, nearly 300 articles had been published on the topic. There was one small issue standing between Blondlot and immortality in Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics: N-rays don’t actually exist.

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Uranium: The Brightest Bad Idea in Diabetes Care

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The use of radioactive compounds as medicines is starting to have it’s moment in the sun. Currently over 60 of these radiopharmaceuticals are approved worldwide, primarily for the purpose of diagnosing and treating cancer. Billion dollar acquisitions have a funny way of getting investors excited, though the specialized nature of these compounds leaves many companies struggling to fill a “significant talent shortage.” Of course, the story of radioactivity in medicine didn’t begin with billion-dollar deals, it began with the curious case of uranium.

Our story begins in 1789, when the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth decided to take a deeper look at what was essentially mining waste. A self taught expert in mineral analysis, Klaproth was busy doing analytical chemistry before it was cool. The hipsters among us may know him for his work on zirconium, but his early work on uranium is definitely one of his greatest hits. Klaproth had started some early work on the mineral torbernite, but eventually switched to working on a mineral that gold and silver miners knew well: pitchblende. This black substance typically meant that the gold and silver had been exhausted and that it was time to move elsewhere.

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