Moral Values

Friday is our lab's "paper day". Each week, one of us picks a research paper and leads the group to discuss it.

Today is my turn. In the paper I picked there is a gene named Shibire. It is a Temperature Sensitive leathal mutant, which means that under normal temperature it lives pretty happily, but under high temperature, say, 29 degrees Celsius, it dies. We usually call this kind of mutants "TS" mutants. For this particular mutant, Shibire, it suffers so many defects in every part of its messed-up body that death seems to be the best thing that has ever happened to it.

Weird enough. But its name is even weirder. Shibire? It's not in the dictionary.

Me:"What is 'Shibire'? What kind of word is this?"

Boss:"Well, it was first discovered by a Japanese guy. So it's a Japanese word. I have no idea what it means in Japanese, but he named it Shibire, and its abbreviation would be Shi, and because it is a temperature sensitive mutant, he could write it as..."

He spelled it out:

" S-h-i-T-S."

We wrote down the letters and all laughed out loud.

What a smart wacky guy!

"By the way," my boss added,"its abbreviation has been changed to Sh1, for, you know..."

He paused to find a word for this.

I held up my fist high above my head and cried out:

"For Moral Values!"

"Yes. Exactly."