Source: Natalie Angier. 1995. The beauty of the beastly. Houghton Mifflin. 234–235.
While scientists concur that the subject of apoptosis is very much alive, they have yet to agree on how to pronounce the term. Some start the word with a long a, other with a short; some pronounce both p's, others drop the second one. The term was coined by Dr. Andrew Wylie, of Edinburgh University in Scotland, who first described the features of this type of cell death and named the process after the classical Greek for "falling from," as leaves fall from trees. But biologists now joke that the word should really refer to hair falling from the scalp, since the male scientists in the apoptosis field all seem to be balding.