Some things never change!

I have periodically written on the issue of nomenclature and how some investigators feels that progress is being made by renaming processes and products. Likewise, being a senior investigator (I had lunch with my pastor earlier this week and we were commenting on how somedays we sit and think, now what exactly happened in the last fifty years), I am baffled by the need of universities to grow by a curious acellular budding process which begats new departments and new chairs all of whom demand equal time and resources. I had thought that this was a recent phenomenum until I had the good fortune to come across a book by W. Mansfield Clark, a professor at Johns Hopkins. The book is entitled "Oxidation-Reduction Potentials of Organic Systems" and was published by Williams & Wilkins in 1960. The content is useful to someone like myself who needs to go back to ground in thermodynamics on a farily frequent basis. However, the real joy is in the Preface. Quoting in part, "Now an admirable result of specialization.........is the distallation of what was long in the brewing until the condensate is free of cloudy matters. An unfortunate consequence can be excessive formalization in the labeling of the minute fractions, or in other words an uncessarily complex set of conventions and technical terms that sutis the convenience of the specialist. This imposes a heavy burden on others who have abundant difficulties of their own." Having written this short note, I am convinced that tomorrow I will read another article describing something that the late Dan Koshland published in the JBC years ago - but, to quote Dragnet, the names have been changed to allow publication.