Microbiology Explained with Star Trek

Jörg Hillebrand, dedicated Trekkie, shared this image sent to him by a friend who is a teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. The poster explains how the parts of a eukaryote resemble parts of a starship from Star Trek. You can find a much larger version here.

I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a Trekkie who is well-versed in technobabble. So I can confirm that this is a very good set of analogies. The nucleus is the captain who commands the entire organism. The cell wall is the hull. It also makes sense to describe the warp core as a mitochondrion and food replicators as ribosomes.

-via Super Punch