It's all very mysterious to my eyes and I don't know of any really authoritative sources on deaf American culture, but it does seem like there is a lot more to it, as well as deaf identity than I initially thought.
I had found the article not long after but hadn't had the chance to edit it in. Now I did, and I wanted to update you: http://poz.com/articles/226_1609.shtml
This article shines a lot of light on the cultural differences between deaf Americans and hearing Americans. That there is little vocabulary for science in ASL, is extremely worrying. The fact that there are those among the deaf community that consider ASL to be "better" than English, is even more worrying. Thanks again for taking the time to find that article."There's a lack of sign-language vocabulary for science and its diseases," Karen Sadler says. "It's difficult to get across the meaning of words such as positive, which in medical terminology has the opposite meaning from the traditional definition."