Petr wrote:
>Isn't Hasselba*L*ch (as in "Henderson-Hasselbalch") a very strange
>sounding name? It must be _the_ most frequently misspelled name in
>textbooks.
Probably you're right, but Burk (as in Lineweaver &) must be a hot contender.
>Also, call me strange, but I usually stop reading anything biochemical if
>the author consistently has "Michaelis-Ment*O*n". That one always gets me.
I sympathize, but I've seen Menton so often in texts that are acceptable
from the biochemical point of view that I put it down to dyslexia more than
ignorance. I have, however, often wondered why the wrong spelling is so
popular. It's not as if the French town of that name is so famous, and if
one regards it as the name of a German (which of course she wasn't) I would
have thought that the correct spelling would be more likely.
Menten was unfortunate in providing two opportunities for authors to
misspell her name. Whenever you see her Christian name written it's about
as likely to appear (incorrectly) as Maude rather than as Maud. I've even
seen her appear as M. M. L. Menten, the first M. being added by authors who
have seen the original paper but have mistaken the "Miss" at the beginning
for a name.
Ignorance of the scientific contributions of these people is, of course,
more serious than ignorance of how their names are spelt. Only last week I
was reading an article of a very high standard that unfortunately used the
name "Michaelis-Menten plot" for a plot of v against [S], with the
implication that the authors share the widespread misconception that that
is what Michaelis and Menten plotted. Likewise the number of authors who
think that Lineweaver and Burk obtained their parameter values by reading
them off a plot of 1/v against 1[S] must vastly outnumber those who
remember what they actually did. Even the original authors themselves
seemed a bit confused about it after half a century (see Burk (1984) TiBS
9, 202-204).
If I remember rightly (it's a long time since I checked) Lineweaver and
Burk gave an incorrect reference to Michaelis and Menten in their paper of
1934, and at one time one used to see the same incorrect reference in
papers that purported to be citing the original source.
Athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/homepage.htm
Phone: + 33 491 16 41 38; fax: + 33 491 16 45 78
CNRS-BIP, B.P. 71, 13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France
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