Sonic the Rule

All nerds are biochem researchers?

This one is actually a big of a tragic coincidence. A lot of genes are first discovered in a certain type of fruit fly (drosophilia melanogaster), which are excellent for this because of the low amount of gene redundancy and high reproduction rate.

There's a series of genes that cause the fruit fly to have little spikes in their body, making them look a bit like hedgehogs. One of those was jokingly called sonic.

The problem is that this gene is present in humans, too, and has since been linked to severe brain deformities. As you can imagine, telling people that their child has a severe brain defect because of the sonic hedgehog gene is kind of problematic (Which is why it's now commonly only called SHH).

There seem to be newer naming conventions that should prevent this kind of issue in the future.

There's an episode of Let's Learn Everything about this fruit fly: Episode 78

Yeye

I found it in a telegram channel for "real science diagrams that look like shitposts"