A rock star chemist sends me word of a company which has a product calledThe Qubit Quantitation System (You’ll have to say what country you are connecting from to see this page.) Those biologists have stolen our “qubit!” I wonder if they realize that their product will get horrible placement on search engines because they are using a very common and highly linked word. Doesn’t seem like the best strategy to me. (On another note, am I the only one who is annoyed by the word “assay?”)
O brave new quantum world!
`quantitating’ is the least cromulent word i’ve heard in a long time.
Biologists need a way to validify their results, too. But now that you get me thinking, I believe we’re having our sixth biophysics seminar speaker for the semester this afternoon, for a department with one biophysicist. Hey Dave… I’m back!
Speaking as a physicist newly transferred into biology, they love to slap fancy names on things. The word ‘assay’ is very common, rather annoying, and abhorrently useful. You see, most biologists wouldn’t do what we call ‘measure,’ so it gives them a neutral word to use instead of ‘looked at the pretty colors.’
On the other hand, when they try to be quantitative, they do so in two ways. The good ones stick to what Fisher derived in the first half of the twentieth century and don’t go astray. The bad ones follow short lived fads. Six months ago, everything in biology was going to be a bistable switch, whether it will or no. Now it will be a network.
JM, is your one biophysicist the chair of the seminar chair? I’m doing that in my department and there will likely be lots of quantum optics talks!
Why is the word “assay” so annoying?
Well for starters, what’s wrong with the words “trial” or “attempt”?
Because that’s not how the word is used in biology.
(from Merriam-Webster:
1 archaic : TRIAL, ATTEMPT
2 : examination and determination as to characteristics (as weight, measure, or quality)
3 : analysis (as of an ore or drug) to determine the presence, absence, or quantity of one or more components
4 : a substance to be assayed; also : the tabulated result of assaying
)
In biology, “assay” isn’t used in the archaic meaning, but for meaning 2 or 3 above. “Measure” isn’t the right word, because sometimes you do an analysis (or “assay” as we call it) and you aren’t measuring anything. You don’t “measure” if there is a mutant version of a gene in a Southern Blot assay – you detect it on an autoradiograph, and you either see a band or you don’t.
I don’t understand from where all this snootiness originates. Maybe in physics you don’t use the word or it means something else. In any case, why not accept that terminology in different fields means different things? Most of the time it appears when people outside a field are annoyed by the use of a particular word, it’s because they don’t understand how it’s used in that field.
No need for cunctation — study the English master of vocabulary:
http://ta-multimedia.com/blackadder/bajohnsontrans.html
Fenerally physicists call anything that detects something a measurement. So we would say that, yes, you are “measuring” whether there exists a mutant version of a gene in the sample. (It would collapse the wave function ;-))
I think it’s all just backlash from biologists stealing ‘qubit’. It’ll pass.
I think “assay” is a funny word. It originates from the French verb “essayer”, meaning “to try”. “assay” sounds to me like George Bush trying to speak French.