Too many cytokines

It feels so good to be done with the first exam of our new block.  This one covered mostly biochem and immunology, but had some pathology thrown in with it.  It was pretty brutal, a lot of it.  I think one of the most frustrating things in studying the basic science behind medicine is the nomenclature, especially when we get talking about the most recently discovered, ultra-specific nomenclature.  Cytokines are the worst: you get IL-2 through IL-50 it seems with several of them doing the same thing, while others are doing more than one thing and totally different things.  There's no rhyme or reason to it really.  I guess it's just based on when it was discovered.  Mix that in with the coagulation cascade, where they decided to use Roman numerals, and the cascade doesn't fully go in numerical order, and some of the Roman numeral factors have different names.  Because we had biochem on this test to, we were studying signal transduction, so we got a bunch of different receptor tyrosine kinases with specific names and specific factors dancing around in the cell carrying on these messages, but some of these were given names with capitals, like GEF and GAP, and some with lower case, like ras and rho.
I have to say, I really love learning, and I really am interested in understanding the mechanism behind these disease processes, but I hate learning a lot of the acronym mumbo-jumbo names for what going on at the biochemical level.