Funny Things Scientists Parents Can Say to Their Kids

I don't know how other prospective fathers treat their wives' pregnancies, but I saw it as a science project. It had a protocol, parameters, a timeline, and even the one item that makes funding agencies happy: a deliverable. I found myself poking at my wife's abdomen, asking, "Who's Daddy's little gestating blastocyst? Who's recapitulating phylogeny?"

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Advanced Article Search Life & Career Experimental Error: Fetus Don't Fail Me Now By Adam Ruben May 27, 2011 Despite having taken graduate-level developmental biology, I still found myself staring at Maya in complete awe and wonder, amazed at her blue eyes and the tininess of her toenails, convinced of the sheer impossibility of her existence.

I'm staring down the eyepiece of a microscope at a tangled but orderly mass of cells, moving the stage past the mucoid connective tissue to examine the concentric circles of a placental vein. All in all, it's a fairly normal activity for a biologist except that the sample I'm examining is a cross-section of my own umbilicus.

Not "my own" as in "I purchased it from a biological supply company," but as in "these are actually the freaking cells that connected me to my mother 32 years ago."

At the time I was born, my mother worked in an anatomy lab at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The control of biological material must have been a bit more lax in the late 1970s (maybe cautiousness inversely correlates with lapel width), because she was somehow able to sneak a piece of my (our) umbilical cord to her lab microtome, where she carved two thin sections and mounted them on glass slides, just for fun.

Perhaps it was Bring an Unsanitary Piece of Your Child to Work Day.

Five presidential administrations later, in a different biology lab in a different city, I'm photographing the cells -- because it might be neat to put the pictures on Facebook -- and expecting my own first child.

The obvious question (besides "How would you tag your umbilicus on Facebook?") is, “What sort of parent would prepare such a specimen, much less save it for 3 decades?” And the answer is, a scientist.

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I don't know how other prospective fathers treat their wives' pregnancies, but I saw it as a science project. It had a protocol, parameters, a timeline, and even the one item that makes funding agencies happy: a deliverable. I found myself poking at my wife's abdomen, asking, "Who's Daddy's little gestating blastocyst? Who's recapitulating phylogeny?" If I had published the results in a peer-reviewed journal, the article would have looked like this:

It's important to start kids on a career path early, which is why I already anticipate lobbying my daughter to become a scientist. "See the pretty flowers!" I'll tell her. "Don't they make you want to submit an R01 proposal to study an obscure transmembrane protein in their plasmodesmata?"

Scientists speak to their children differently than most people, and I'll probably find myself saying one or more of the following:

- "I'll pick you up from school at 3:30 ± 10 minutes."

- "Oh, I see. And if all of your friends rejected the Copernican principle, does that mean you would, too?"

- "I know you like peanut butter, but I don't know if you like peanut butter and jelly, so I packed you one sandwich of each. The peanut-butter-only sandwich is the control group."

- "Don't waste food! There are starving grad students in the world!"

- "If you kids don't quiet down back there, I swear I'll turn this car ? radians."

- "Sorry, I'd love to buy you that video game system, but the funding didn't come through."

- "I brought you into this world, and global climate change brought about by excess carbon emissions can take you out."

- "If you don't eat your vegetables, you'll never grow up to be big and strong, which is probably okay because then you won't be able to beat me up."

- "Because I said so, that's why. And in this family, I have tenure."

A good list of quotes, but kids probably won't get them.