When eminent stem cell biologist Helen Blau reads her recently published picture book, Stem Cells to the Rescue, to her grandchildren, even the 5-year-old sits still.
“I’ve read it to them many times,” says Blau, a Stanford professor of microbiology and immunology and the director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. The grandmother of four describes how her grandkids, ages 5 to 9, especially love to point to the curly-haired frog looking through a microscope on page 30. “They knew right away it was me,” she says, chuckling.
Cover Image: Text by Helen M. Blau; Illustrations by Margery J. Fain
Filled with dancing stem cell blobs and active frogs—who like to color, eat ice cream, and swim, just like her grandchildren—Blau’s rhyming book is a collaboration with illustrator Margery Fain, ’69, a former PhD classmate from Harvard. It was inspired by their own grandchildren and by a desire to educate all children (and hopefully their parents and grandparents too) about stem cells—those versatile building blocks that both regenerate and differentiate into other types of cells, playing an important role in tissue maintenance and repair.
“It’s not so easy for the general public to understand what stem cells are all about,” says Blau, who was awarded the National Medal of Science in January for her work on cellular plasticity, muscle regeneration, and aging. “We thought this was a way to teach while bringing joy to kids.”
The book was published last year by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, the publishing arm of a top academic biomedical research center (its other children’s titles include Have a Nice DNA). The first half of Blau’s book shows how stem cells come to the rescue when kids get hurt, say, by falling off the jungle gym and scraping their knee. Then, in the second half, as the frogs age and turn into grandparents with glasses, it’s scientists like Blau who become the rescuers.
Blau. (Photo: Mari Carmen/CNIO)
Researchers are making progress on how to “make new stem cells,” the book says, to repair grandma’s eyes or to regenerate cartilage in grandpa’s aching knees—both among Blau’s research collaborations. For Blau, who has written hundreds of scientific publications, this was her first foray into children’s literature. It was so fun that she might write another, she says. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could inspire kids to want to be scientists?”
Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.
