Singing Science

udderly writes " Wired is running a story about a University of Washington biology lecturer, Greg Crowther, who sings lectures. From the article: 'Crowther bursts into song to the melody of Sugar Sugar, the bubble-gum '60s tune - "Glucose, ah sugar sugar / You are my favorite fuel from the bloodborne substrate pool / Glucose -- monosaccharide sugar -- you're sweeter than a woman's kiss / 'cause I need you for glycolysis."' In college I used many different types of devices to help memorize information like this. Crowther has a page where you can download samples. Among my favorites are The Krebs Cycle and Come On Down (The Electron Transport Chain)."

Comments

Re:Mother of God

[JabberWokky]

Oh, c'mon... this is pretty durn standard stuff. I have a box of cassettes of this kind of music, and a rack of CDs. It's called Filk, and there's both Science and Science Fiction variants. Back before it had a name, it was just music done by scientists and professors. Tom Lehrer was singing about the elements, Wernher Von Braun and New Math starting in the late 50s, and I have a songbook of Medieval students songs that predates that by several centuries.

Heck, I've written songs about Polyethylene terephthalate and patch panels... they are things I work with and like. I also write and sing songs about corsets and myths and the SCA. Pretty much anything that somebody likes or is into, if they are a musician, gets written about. I have lyrics about the tetramanganese cluster in Photosystem II because my fiance worked with it.

It's not "nerdy", it's simply people singing about what they do, work and play with. Pretty much the same as all the songs about the railroad, playing baseball or about steelworkers, only these happen to be written by people in the sciences. If you're riding on a railroad, you write "City of New Orleans". If you're working with NMR spec, you write a song about spectroscopy.

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Evan