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From: LEICHTER@Venus.YCC.Yale.Edu (Jerry Leichter)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: Virus Naming
Message-ID: <0001.8908241743.AA12387@ge.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 22 Aug 89 14:39:00 GMT
Sender: Virus Discussion List <VIRUS-L@IBM1.CC.Lehigh.EDU>
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Approved: krvw@sei.cmu.edu

Every new virus report these days seems to lead to a debate about a
proper name for the beasts.  May I suggest that this matter be
settled, once and for all, by adopting long-established traditions
used in a variety of sciences, ranging from astronomy to biology to
medicine: The discoverer of, or the first person to describe, a
planet/microbe/disease has an essentially absolute right to choose a
name for it.  A poorly-chosen name for something that gets discussed
extensively will sometimes fall by the wayside, but that's the
exception.

The closest match from the traditional sciences is clearly with
medicine.  The person who gets to choose the name is the person who
publishes the first article which describes the disease in some
detail.  The tone of such articles is quite similar to the tone of the
recent analyses of viral code.  While the discover can choose any name
he likes, traditionally the names chosen reflect either some obvious
and distinctive mark or symptom of the disease (AIDS - Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome), or the place where it was first noted (Lyme
Disease).  When the discoverer doesn't choose a name, the disease
often gets named after him (Wernickie's Aphasia).

Other fields of science have established their own traditions (names
of Roman gods for planets; Latin descriptive terms for species -
though this gets tempered by humor).  Biological viruses have pretty
arbitrary names: One large class, the Coxsackie viruses, are named
after a town in upstate New York where the first member of the class
was isolated; another, the Herpes viruses, I believe have a name
derived from Greek via a particular disease caused by one of them.
Others have names like "T4 phage".

                            -- Jerry