I majored in bioengineering and this I put this entirely to the fact that I participated in my country biology olympiad. I wasn't very good (never went to the international olympiad) but I met passionate people who made biology their career and were full of astonishing stories.

But indeed there was a lot of boring and story-less recitation during my courses. One my most vivid memory was that of a cell signaling course. This activate this and promotes this thingy. Half of the class was asleep. At some point the professor describe some of the function of the SSH gene. You've got a gradient of this stuff combined with two others gradients of other gene and you got a nice differentiation in embryonic development. Whatever, I was waiting for something else. But then we got unto the next pathway I don't remember nor care about. And that made me furious. It was indeed a "lifeless recitation of name",

Because SHH is an acronym. An acronym for Sonic Hedgehog ! As in Sonic the videogame mascot from Sega ! In serious developmental biology ! It's something unusual, something that sticks, something that's worth telling a story. But no, it's SHH, represented as a boring abstracted circle in an abstracted pathway. I knew the story (not from the olympiad people, maybe it was in a random listicle in the IFLS Facebook back when I used facebook), and I wish, I wish that the guy in the front who's supposed to be a professor and supposed to teach would go on a little tangent that drosophilia biologist generally name their gene in a funnier way than human biologists. The professor could just said that, just as a way for bored student barely out of their teenage years to have some interest, to make the material easier to stick somehow ! But no, "lifeless recitation of name" indeed.

The only molecule name I do remember from this course is cyclopamine. Because when I look for it in Wikipedia there's a frigging real cyclops photo in there. I think it was one of the rare instance of something cool appearing in the actual course slide, but I'm honestly not sure about it (incidentally cyclopanine disrupts the Sonic Hedgehog pathway)