Monday, February 01, 2010

Bad omics word of the day: vaccinomics

The more I look at the litany of omics words, the more I fret. So let's just get straight to the point. Todays bad omics word is "Vaccinomics" which was defined as follows:
Vaccinomics encompasses the fields of immunogenetics and immunogenomics as applied to understanding the mechanisms of heterogeneity in immune responses to vaccines
I do not like this word but if you want to learn more I guess you could look here. Not really much more to say.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Jonathan,
    I see this as another example of our increasing cultural tendency toward streamlining everything. It's similar to the way that Blackberries improve the speed of communication while eroding the quality of communication. This -omics fixation is another example of our willingness to trade off precision for celerity (I get a bonus word point for that one).
    Mark Hance

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  2. I think streamlining and increasing speed of communication is fine. But it should not be viewed as the goal - it is just a tool. It can be used well or poorly. Take twitter. It can be used poorly. Or it can be used well (I love it for science news and communication). So if the goal behind the use of the word vaccinomics was to make communication simpler and faster then it could work in that you would not have to write out longer phrases. But in the end, it seems to be unnecessary as do many other omics - and they follow your "precision - celerity" trade off problem well.

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  3. Eisenomics is a growing field alright...

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