The people who picked the name LUPA for a European dog genome study probably didn’t see this one coming. A letter* in this week’s Science says the researchers involved are labouring not under the name of a she-wolf but of a rather less salubrious ‘lady of the night’.

According to Science’s original article* the project was named “after the legendary wolf who nourished the founders of Rome” (see here for the legend). But according to Renato Baserga, cancer biologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, this history is a little off:

The she-wolf legend was dismissed even by the Roman historian Titus Livius, who explained that the mother of Romulus and Remus was a certain Acca Laurentia, a very prosperous sex worker (to use a Dutch expression)—so prosperous that she left a lot of money to the city founded by her sons. In popular Latin, lupa meant she-wolf, but it also meant whore.

According to the original article LUPA will obtain DNA samples and medical histories from 8,000 dogs. It aims to find genes for diseases including cancers and heart problems, then see what these genes do in humans. Maybe a name change is in order first though.

“…I suggest JASPER, the name of my German shepherd, who is, of course, the best specimen of the best of all possible breeds,” says Baserga.

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