Lab Babble: Alphabetti spaghetti

There are really two types of scientific project. On the one hand we have the likes of the Large Hadron Collider, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Human Genome Project.

On the other, there’s CICERO (Control information system concepts based on encapsulated real-time objects), NOMAD (Neutrino Oscillation MAgnetic Detector) and (a particularly good example) CANGAROO (Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory).

The second type, as you will have worked out by now, are victims of what is known as COntrived Scientific Project Labelling Acronym sYndrome, or COSPLAY. This is a widespread condition which is thought to have originated in the brain of a Californian researcher conducting self-medicated research into the hallucinogenic effects of certain narcotic substances during the 1960s.

It somehow escaped the laboratory and began infecting other institutions. The precise vector of contamination is not certain, but it is thought to have caused a superspreader event at NASA (the US National Acronym-Slinging Agency) before escaping into the wider scientific community.

It somehow escaped the laboratory and began infecting other institutions

It’s worth clarifying, that the disorder appears to be limited to acronyms and does not affect mere initialisms. We have seen uncontained growth in the length of the latter, such as the 40% surge from the humble three-letter SRC to the EPSRC, but that initialism-inflation appears unconnected to COSPLAY. Indeed, these bodies seem practically immune to the syndrome, barely managing to create a pronounceable acronym in their entire history.

Outward signs of the contagion may be limited; it is only under the stimulus of project start-ups and the writing of grant proposals that it manifests. In some cases the effects can be quite devastating to both the individual and the project itself.

Night fevers, lack of concentration and a curious obsession with Scrabble tiles are common symptoms among sufferers; projects may be delayed while committees procrastinate over the wittiest, cleverest, or simply most finagled arrangement of letters they can create.

The effects on productivity can be severe, as the critical early stages of a project are generally when the most creativity is needed. By diverting this limited resource from project design to tedious nomenclature, a great many discoveries and breakthroughs may have been lost.

This probably explains what a marvellous job the research councils do – a factor widely acknowledged in the scientific community. They can spend all their efforts on carefully assessing funding bids purely on their merits, in which they have a reputation on a par with VAR: never wrong.

Thankfully, help is now at hand. The playing field is about to be levelled with the introduction of my new acronym consultancy service aimed at every laboratory in the world. Those which have previously laboured for lengthy periods to come up with a sparky name will find their imagination can be diverted to pure science, while those who have shamedly stuck with boring initialisms can join the cool kids with their very own memorable acronym.

My AI-powered project will create your acronym for you, based on a huge repository of vaguely related terms and some jiggerypokery with the rules of grammar. Fees will be exorbitant, but worth every penny.