The MEDLINE database of biomedical abstracts contains scientific knowledge about thousands of interacting genes and proteins. Automated text processing can aid in the comprehension and synthesis of this valuable information. The fundamental task of identifying gene and protein names is a necessary first step towards making full use of the information encoded in biomedical text. This remains a challenging task due to the irregularities and ambiguities in gene and protein nomenclature. We propose to approach the detection of gene and protein names in scientific abstracts as part-of-speech tagging, the most basic form of linguistic corpus annotation.