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The Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press, was created with the goal of making books on science, technology, and health more widely available to professionals and the public. Joseph Henry was one of the founders of the National Academy of Sciences and a leader in early American science.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parson, Ann B.
The Proteus effect : stem cells and their promise for medicine / by Ann B. Parson.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-309-08988-3 (cloth with jacket) ISBN 0-309-53329-5 (PDF)
1. Stem cells—Research—History. 2. Stem cells—Popular works. [DNLM: 1. Research—history. 2. Stem Cells. 3. Stem Cell
Transplantation. QH 581.2 P266p 2004] I. Title.
QH588.S83P37 2004
616'.02774—dc22
2004013757
Cover image: © Victor Habbick Visions/Photo Researchers, Inc.
Copyright 2004 by Ann B. Parson. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Proteus—a Sea God and Ocean Shepard for Poseidon’s seals—was able to change shape when the occasion warranted.
Some have the gift to change and change again in many forms, like Proteus, creature of the encircling seas, who sometimes seemed a lad, sometimes a lion, sometimes a snake men feared to touch, sometimes a charging boar, or else a sharp-horned bull; often he was a stone, often a tree, or feigning flowing water seemed a river or water’s opposite a flame of fire.
—Metamorphoses 8.731
To Proteus. Proteus I call, whom fate decrees to keep the keys which lock the chambers of the deep; first-born, by whose illustrious power alone all nature’s principles were clearly shown. Pure sacred matter to transmute is thine, and decorate with forms all-various and divine. All-honoured, prudent, whose sagacious mind knows all that was and is of every kind, with all that shall be in succeeding time, so vast thy wisdom, wondrous and sublime: for all things Nature first to thee consigned, and in thy essence omniform confined. O father, to the mystics’ rites attend, and grant, a blessed life a prosperous end.
—Orphic Hymn 25 to Proteus
