An amazing amount of biochemistry has been worked out in reverse from drugs and poisons. I once worked on a protein called TOR, which is a key regulator of cell

An amazing amount of biochemistry has been worked out in reverse from drugs and poisons. I once worked on a protein called TOR, which is a key regulator of cell growth; that gets its name because it's the Target Of Rapamycin, rapamycin being a drug. In fruitflies and nematodes, the preferred way to shake things until they break is mutation rather than drugs, so genes often have names describing what happens when the gene is broken - which is quite confusing. So, another protein i worked on is called Dlg, short for "discs large", because in fruitflies, when missing, the imaginal discs get too big. So you know Dlg's function is somehow to keep imaginal discs small.