Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2023-12-20 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Votey panel for new
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Explanation

This comic shows a parent (or grandparent) figure at a dinner table with children, declaring: "Eat your dinner now, or I'll spray you with a de-novo entirely new body fluid that is genetically recognizable as human but wasn't synthesizable and derived from modified yeast!"

The caption below reads: "Many of the possibilities of CRISPR took years to recognize."

The joke imagines a future application of CRISPR gene-editing technology that nobody asked for or anticipated: engineering yeast to produce novel human body fluids that don't currently exist. The humor works on several levels. First, there's the absurdity of the threat itself -- spraying children with a lab-grown body fluid as a dinner-table punishment is grotesque and bizarre. Second, the fluid is described in meticulously scientific language ("genetically recognizable as human," "derived from modified yeast") which contrasts hilariously with the mundane domestic scenario.

The caption adds an additional layer, framing this nightmarish creation as one of the "possibilities of CRISPR" that took time to recognize -- as if this is a legitimate technological milestone rather than something profoundly disturbing. The comic satirizes both the utopian promises made about gene-editing technology and the unpredictable, potentially horrifying directions that technology can take. While CRISPR discussions usually focus on curing diseases or designer babies, this comic imagines the technology being used for something no one wanted: creating entirely new body fluids for the sole purpose of threatening children at dinner. It's a darkly funny take on unintended consequences of scientific progress.

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