And I am being quite serious about this.
There are a few things that bugs and diseases are named after. The boring ones are the medical ones – just basically what the disease does to you or how it works. Tuberculosis gets its name from the bacterium that causes it, which in turn gets its name from the tubercules that it produces. Dull.
Then there are the ones named after places or events. I quite like the idea of those. Lyme disease is named after the town in Connecticut where it was first identified. Legionella – the causal agent of Legionnaire’s Disease – was named because it caused an outbreak at an American Legion conference in Philadelphia (incidentally in 1976 – just a year after Lyme Disease was named – woohoo mid-70s North East USA).
But if you want longevity in the microbiological world, you need a bug or disease named after you. There are loads of bugs that are named after people – the people are usually being the ones that discovered the bug. I used to work in an office next to Professor Sir Anthony Epstein, of Epstein-Barr virus fame. I guess that the name Epstein will live on in another context now (sadly still involving kissing teenagers), but that’s not the virologist’s fault.
Everyone who ever works with that bug will know that it is named after you: always. So it is a bit of a dream to have a microbe named after you in that way. If you’re a microbiologist.
But then there are the eponymous diseases. And while you might also gain fame and longevity from having one of those named after you, it’s generally not a good thing, no matter how you try to spin it.
Yeah. There’s not much good that can come out of that sort of diagnosis.
So, no thanks. I’ll happily settle for the “he discovered it” route, rather than the “we’ve never seen this set of symptoms in a human before” one.