Where the Crawdads Sing, one of the most popular movies released in 2022, has brought the subject of stem cell research to the masses.
Without giving away too many spoilers, the main character Catherine Danielle Clark, nicknamed Kya, grew up in the marshes of North Carolina with no formal education and never learned how to read while growing up.
Kya’s childhood friend Tate Walker learns of this and teaches her to read. During a montage of all of the new subjects she has explored after finally learning to read, Kya mentions stem cells at roughly 37 minutes and 35 seconds into the movie:
“We went through the whole library….Three times a week, summer into fall…Learned how plants and animals changed over time to adjust to the ever-shifting Earth… How some cells divide and specialize into lungs or hearts while other remain uncommitted stem cells, in case they are needed later.”
As Kya learned something new about stem cell research, we hope the millions of viewers who watched the movie learned something as well.
Update:
‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ takes place in a North Carolina marsh in 1953, and stem cells were technically not discovered until the 1960s. Thank you Dominic in the comments section for pointing out this discrepancy.
Except the book is set a decade before stem cells were discovered
Great observation! Where the Crawdads Sing takes place in 1953, and stem cells were discovered in the 1960s.