Bio-Based Encouragement

December 6, 2012 5:03 PM

Need some biology based phrases of encouragement for a poster.

A good friend of mine is defending her dissertation tomorrow and I am planning on attending with a few encouraging and congradulatory posters to be held by me and other friends (don't worry, I have asked the defender and signs are fine). The thing is, she is a bio person. I most certainly am not, so don't know where to begin.

Please give me some good and encouraging bio-based puns or similar that will fit on a small poster!

posted by chiefthe to science & nature (10 answers total)

What kind of bio? It matters for maximum pun-effectiveness
posted by fshgrl at 5:08 PM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

Nervous system cells, by the looks of things. And I think it was experiment based work (so not computational).
posted by chiefthe at 5:14 PM on December 6, 2012

Fight Not Flight!

Dear Panel: Please be parasympathetic!

[X] is the leader of our ganglia!
posted by Ufez Jones at 5:20 PM on December 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

Don't be nervous!
posted by bswinburn at 5:45 PM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

What organism does she study?
posted by sciencegeek at 6:15 PM on December 6, 2012

I am tired, so I can't quite complete the thought here, but I am thinking you might be able to use the phrase "good body of work" somewhere.
posted by Michele in California at 6:22 PM on December 6, 2012

Nervous system cells, by the looks of things

You Have The Potential!

It's In The Basket (Cell)!
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:33 PM on December 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

Axon, right hand.
Axoff, left hand.
Don't forget to breathe--
Very important.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 6:37 PM on December 6, 2012 [2 favorites]

You're being very sweet and no matter what you do, your friend will appreciate it.

Without knowing *exactly* what she studies (down to the name of the genes she works on?) you're not going to be able to be *particularly* clever.

Does she drink? Maybe play on the "Sure, drinking kills brain cells, but only the weakest ones!" but turn it around to "Sure, drinking kills connections, but the strongest synapses persist!"

"LTP, LTD. FTS." if she's been pretty down on the whole grad school thing recently and needs to blow some steam off.

Are you familiar with Pinky and the Brain? They had a Brain Song mini episode. Perhaps take some ideas from there?

On the vein of "I want to believe" or "moon langing hoax" or some other conspiracy use a picture of Golgi stained neurons from the 1900's - for some reason, some sparse random neurons can be stained by the Golgi method. The thing is, in different brains and even different slices of the same brain, the same low percentage of a subset of neurons are impregnated with the stain, but not ever the same proportions of sub-subset of neurons even if the percentages of sub-subsets are identical. Totally random. We still have no idea why this is so, but it is extraordinarily fortuitous for early neuroscience that this method of staining individual neurons in a brain packed with them did so. Unresolved mystery, but an extremely important early milestone in modern neuroscience.

/recent, currently unemployed, molecular neuroscience PhD grad that is quite impaired
posted by porpoise at 9:07 PM on December 6, 2012

I went with "Don't be Nervous" with a picture of a nerve cell and "You have the Potential" with a potential activation graph. They were big hits! Thanks for the help!
posted by chiefthe at 1:37 PM on December 7, 2012 [2 favorites]