Stem cells are rarely the subject of
cartoons, but one popped last week from
Bizarro.
The cartoon appeared in the
San
Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere, including
the
Bizarro web site. The image was of a petri dish in a lab with
tiny maternal speck giving parental advice to an even tinier speck:
"You can be anything you want to be when you grow up."
Artist
Dan Piraro said the cartoon was his favorite of the
week because of its “strangeness.”
Piraro wrote on his blog,
“To use a term common in the
vernacular of geneticists, it’s creepy cool.”
The cartoon did not differentiate
between embryonic and adult cells, much less reprogrammed adult
cells. Using reprogrammed cells in the cartoon would have been even
creepier and cooler, giving new meaning to the 1947 song,
“I Am My
Own Grandpa.”(See
here and
here.)
(A nod to "Bob" for calling our attention to the cartoon.)
