Chapter 47

So I was reading biology tonight in my apartment, and I was nearing the end of chapter 47 in my book, which deals with Animal Development, specifically the development of embryos. Chapter 47 is a brutally long chapter with very complex concepts, and as I was finishing it up, I felt myself fading in my comprehension (and probably falling asleep). I was reading about the zone of polarizing activity, which is part of the mechanism that help signal the formation of limbs, and the reading went something like this.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Sonic hedgehog* blah blah blah blah blah blah ....

Wait wha? I shake my head to wake up and I see the words Sonic Hedgehog, referencing an important protein growth factor secreted by the ZPA...and the term has an * by it as I indicated in the passage above. In the lower right hand of the page, you can read what the * stands for, and this is what it says...and I quote

*Sonic hedgehog gets its name from two sources: its similarity to a Drosophila protein called Hedgehog, which is involved in segmentation of the fly embryo, and a video game character.

Oh those wacky biologists.