I think it’s just the most simplified you can get talking about cellular biology, specifically when teaching organelles. So most primary science textbooks use that terminology and it’s more memorable than all the other organelles so it just stuck and it got repeated and reviewed every year and it sorta became a pre Internet meme and part of a shared consciousness if you were schooled in the US.
We actually had the same sentence as the headline for the chapter about mitochondria in our class in the late 90s, just translated. “Mitochondrien - das Kraftwerk der Zelle”
As a non-native English speaker, I still have no idea why this specific phrase is so significant and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
I was born in the 1970’s and it is lost on me too, I think its something that became a thing to the generation after me
I think it comes from an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and exploded as a meme.
It’s not from any specific media reference, it’s just essentially what every child was taught, verbatim, in grade school.
Apparently as an Internet thing it only really took off in 2013 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mitochondria-is-the-powerhouse-of-the-cell
Huh, I figured it was Dexter’s Lab or some cartoon.
the meme originated from tumblr. the quote itself is older than color tv.
Well ‘meme’ is an older idea than image macros =p
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I think it’s just the most simplified you can get talking about cellular biology, specifically when teaching organelles. So most primary science textbooks use that terminology and it’s more memorable than all the other organelles so it just stuck and it got repeated and reviewed every year and it sorta became a pre Internet meme and part of a shared consciousness if you were schooled in the US.
We actually had the same sentence as the headline for the chapter about mitochondria in our class in the late 90s, just translated. “Mitochondrien - das Kraftwerk der Zelle”