Monday, January 30, 2012

Scientific pet names

This is maybe not the most original cartoon in my life, but at least it is sweet and related a little bit to science. And well, such names are not surprising when coming from a scientific spinster and animal right activist...

4 comments:

  1. I really love your strips! The Cat is my favorite and related to my work as well. The dog and the cat had sad destinies but how about the mouse?

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  2. Thanks for the comment :-)... I am not sure that Pavlov's dogs had tragic deaths (but one never knows what happened in Russian laboratories ;-))... In my opinion, they were only salivating a little bit extensively during conditioning experiments, and had to wait for the bell to ring to get the food... Schrödinger's cat is hopefully both dead and alive even now (I can refer to the paradox thought experiment). So I think that poor Algernon had the saddest story in Daniel Keyes' sci-fi entitled Flowers for Algernon. (The eponymous Algernon is a laboratory mouse who has undergone surgery to increase his intelligence by artificial means. The surgery worked very well for a while, but then Algernon suddenly declined and lost his increased intelligence and died shortly afterward. But the story is more complex, but this is for the mouse...) Maybe I'll change anyway the drawing and correct it to Priestley's mice, that would be more adequate anyway. (The other animals are both named after a scientist.) That mice were used in an experiment to demonstrate that photosynthesis makes oxygen. Your comment made me think about the comic strip and to develop it further, thanks again.

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  3. Isn't the flower for Algernon an Arabidopsis? =)

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  4. Thanx for the comment... Yes, maybe I should have drawn a white Arabidopsis flower there. But maybe this could lead us to another cartoon in the future :-)

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