Geek humor (not likely to make Reader's Digest)

When deep, probing, intelligent questions are really very stupid.

In the course of my research I generally use mES cells. The mES are mouse embyronic stem cells and happen to be male. Through the wonders of nature, male lines have only one copy of sex-linked genes, while females have 2. If you decide to work with those genes it's important to know whether there are 1 or 2 copies. Anyway, I was at a meeting with a professor I work for, and I was talking about switching to CHO cells instead of mES. I thought their sex might be important, and since I wasn't sure whether our CHOs were a male or female line, I asked the professor. The professor was kind enough to point out to me that CHO cells are "Chineese hamster ovary" cells, and only females have ovaries. Duh.