If you were a cell, which one would you be?

By Billie Rubin, Hemoglobin’s Catabolic Cousin, reporting from the labs of Stanford Blood Center

A heroic red blood cell - courageous, selfless, hard-working, picking up billions of oxygen molecules in the alveoli and coursing through the heart and every corner of the body electric feeding hungry tissues…

Or a quick bounding platelet - a cohesive force that brings everyone together to bond, hold hands across a gaping wound and save the waste of precious fluids and life itself…

Perhaps a mighty macrophage - a giant of a cell, a shape-shifter and relentless pursuer of evil, patrolling the body, taking care of its enemies and protecting all…

Or maybe a noble dendritic cell - the sentinel, the informer, the presenter of infectious evil to everyone in the immune world…

Perhaps you would be a stem cell - the creator, progenitor, mother, artistic source of all blood cells…

Which one would you be?