Thursday, July 16, 2009

Worst new omics word award: diseasome (thx @steinsky @noahwilliamgray @mocost )

And the winner of the "worst new omics word award" is "diseasome."

Credit for pointing this one out goes to Noah Gray and MoCost on Twitter. See Mos first post here: Twitter / Mo: Diseasome project visualiz ...

And some follow up:
Amazingly, I missed this when the New York Times used it in a headline: "Mapping the Human 'Diseasome' - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com" and in many other reports (see Google search here).

What does diseasome actually mean? I do not know. And it does seem really unnecessary to me. And since I got blasted (justifiably) a bit by one of the people I gave my previous award to here is a clarification. I am not commenting here on the science behind the "diseasome" work. Just the word. And the word, I do not like.

Previous awards I have given:



On Friendfeed:

3 comments:

  1. we came up with a few more along the way.

    Madmaxbeyondthethunderdomics - they study of all films set in a post-apocalyptic future

    Webcome - The totality of all pictorial narratives in sequential individual frames hosted on the internet.

    and then we wondered what the longest scientifically plausible omics might be. the entries so far are:

    humanhybridgerontologicalimmunomisinteractomics

    Bayesianquantitativetraitlocusmappingmodelrefinementalgorithmomics

    but i'm still convinced that economics is a made up science.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Totality of all the omics words: "Dizzisome" - and I thought my term "respirasome" was already borderline ... :)
    Martin

    ReplyDelete
  3. It seems that Simon C. Lovell used the ultimate -omics term. In his chapter on Gene Function and Molecular Evolution (13) in the book " Evolutionary Genetics. Concepts and case studies" edited by Fox and Wolf he states on page 210:
    "Perhaps there will even be efforts to sequence all, or at least representative, genomes for all known species ("genomic-omics"?)".

    ReplyDelete

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