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Published online 22 October 2008 | Nature 455, 1023-1028 (2008) | doi:10.1038/4551023a
News Feature
Language: Disputed definitions
If you want to start an argument, ask the person who just said 'paradigm shift' what it really means. Or 'epigenetic'. Nature goes in search of the terms that get scientists most worked up.
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Systems Biology is conspicuous by absence.
* "trivial" - to an English speaker, this means small and unimportant. In chemistry (at least) it has become synonymous with "easy" * "validate" - this should mean, to show something is valid. In computational chemistry, it has come to mean "find an example which does not disprove a belief" * "novel" - one of the chemistry journals ran an editorial in which they were forced to demand that the word was only used in a title when something was novel. The word had a acquired (still has) a meaning along the lines of "not previously seen (before breakfast today)"
I would agree with Michael Gazzaniga's comment at the end of this article. For many of these terms, the definition or meaning depends on the context in which it is being used, and the investigators in a particular area will know it well enough to be able to use the term to communicate with each other, and that is all that matters. In the end, its actual definition will come out of how it is being used, just as with many words in ordinary language! A definition will, of course, be needed if it is part of a rigorous scientific investigation. But, that may not preclude it from being defined somewhat differently in a different study.