Biology Versus Microsoft, Round 1

The human body has a lot of genes. Thousands and thousands of them. HER2, BRCA1, BRAF, and so on, you get the idea. They're usually some combination of letters and numbers, sometimes forming coherent words, sometimes not. More relevant to today's topic, some have names like MARCH1 -- short for Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1. Also relevant to the topic, many biologists use Microsoft Excel to keep track of research and whatnot. 

Excel was not designed to be used for high-level medical research. It was designed to be user-friendly, and so, if you're a biologist and you input MARCH1 into Excel, the program not so helpfully "corrects" that into a date. Which is incorrect. According to a 2016 study, about one-fifth of genetics-related papers had been affected by Excel errors. There's no way to turn off the autocorrect in Excel either, you have to manually correct it every time, and it's easy to lose that correction if another person loads up the file.

And so, after many years of battle, science has finally capitulated to almighty Microsoft. A total of 27 genes have been renamed in 2020, with MARCH 1 becoming MARCHF1 and SEPT1 becoming SEPTIN1, just to give a couple examples. While this does sound extreme, gene renaming isn't exactly unusual. Genes such as CARS have been renamed to avoid confusion, but this is the first time a software problem caused a rename. And before you ask, Microsoft wasn't interested in changing Excel, since this was such a niche issue. Apparently having correct science isn't important for a company in the technology business.