Life of a Lab Rat

I know there's one or two professional wordsmiths read this 'blog, and I've been having a great time over at Pavlov's Cat just recently. I am going to try to get that part of my readership to consider something.

Alex links to a piece in the NY Times, that raises an interesting point;

Molecular biology is the science of this century. We should be able to build some great clichés on it. But the language of this science doesn’t even give us a toehold. It’s like trying to climb a beaver slide after you’ve been walking through a bog. Perhaps scientists can understand each other when they speak of mRNA’s[sic], and sequencing, and so on. Genomic science needs better words.

Maybe this is the way to get the population at large more clued up about science — get the scientific language out of the keyboards of the ologists and into the mouths of babes, as it were. And while we're at it, maybe the traffic can be two-way so that scientists start writing in language that is understandable.

So if you're feeling a quark short of a neutron, or perhaps a hydrogen bond short of a helix, please post suggestions here (Nigel, don't say a bloody word </voice="Izzard">).