Rare diseases and orphan drugs

Abstract

The word orphan comes from the Greek word orphanos, a child who has lost one parent or both, or an adult who has lost a child. It goes back to the putative Indo-European root ORBH, bereft, as in the Latin word orbus. The obsolete English words orbation and orbity meant orphanhood or childlessness. One who is bereft of freedom is a slave, made to work hard – consider the words for work in some modern European languages, such as the German Arbeit and the Czech robota. In his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Karel Capek introduced the word robot (female robotka) for an imagined race of mechanical men and women. And the etymology reminds us of the link between orphans and the workhouse. In modern English the word orphan is most commonly used in its original Greek sense, but metaphorical meanings have also emerged. An orphan vehicle, for example, is a discontinued model, and an orphan is a line of type that begins a new paragraph at the bottom of a column or page.