It can affect the research - doing subsequent analysis on the resulting data; searching for all genes with the name "J12" resulting in no hits, because it's bee

It can affect the research - doing subsequent analysis on the resulting data; searching for all genes with the name "J12" resulting in no hits, because it's been renamed to "January 12th". This is especially true when sifting through thousands of hits, where searches become more powerful than just listing/sorting the top 10 hits. There are apocrypha in the field about when such results actually impacted results and grants. Not often, but not unheard of either.