New meme alert: Did you know they did surgery on a grape?
- Published
This actually happened...
It鈥檚 freezing cold, we have less than a month to go until Christmas, and the days are so short that 4pm feels like bedtime.
Yep - we鈥檙e almost at the end of the year, which means it鈥檚 time to let out all of our pent-up weirdness (as if we haven't been doing that for the past 11 months anyway...)
And nothing鈥檚 more absurd than the latest meme: 鈥榯hey did surgery on a grape鈥.
If you haven鈥檛 seen it, the meme basically consists of people repeating 鈥渢hey did surgery on a grape鈥 on Twitter, Photoshopping grape-surgery-related images, or wishing the grape a speedy recovery from its surgery.
An early example of the genre
Allow Twitter content?
This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read and before accepting. To view this content choose 鈥榓ccept and continue鈥.
And now here鈥檚 the grape outside the hospital
NGL, we鈥檇 watch this show
And there鈥檚 been a lot of meme cross-over鈥
Coma guy wants to know if they did surgery on a grape
Trump wants us to know that they did surgery on a grape
Allow Twitter content?
This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read and before accepting. To view this content choose 鈥榓ccept and continue鈥.
Parents: is your teenager doing surgery on a grape?
Allow Twitter content?
This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read and before accepting. To view this content choose 鈥榓ccept and continue鈥.
Frankly, it鈥檚 all got a little out of hand...
So Australian writer David Hughes has summed it up in this series of tweets
But the meme hasn鈥檛 come completely out of nowhere. Believe it or not, surgeons have successfully performed surgery on a grape - by gently peeling off its skin, and then stitching it back on.
Might look a little random, but the operation was first carried out to demonstrate the incredible precision of a new type of surgical robot called the 鈥榙a Vinci Xi鈥.
The machine was first seen in , where surgeons in the US state of Illinois successfully peeled a grape鈥檚 skin off - and then again in , where you can see the machine stitch a peeled grape back together.
Then, there was this video tweeted out by a hospital in Australia back in May - which has, in the past two days, been flooded with grape-related responses.
Allow Twitter content?
This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read and before accepting. To view this content choose 鈥榓ccept and continue鈥.
Dr Declan Murphy, an oncologist from Melbourne who was the grape surgeon in the video, tells 大象传媒 Three that they filmed the grape operation for an Australian children's show, to "introduce kids to surgical technology". This particular grape, he says, was called "Grapey McGrapeface".
"Then all of a sudden, months after the original tweet, my Twitter feed went crazy!" he says. "I don't know which influencer picked it up, but they clearly have a massive network."
The robot, he says, is now "put to good use on humans with cancer".
Each machine costs about 拢1.5 million - which is why there are currently only 10 of them in the whole of the UK. But as you can see from this 大象传媒 News report from April this year, it means doctors can perform extremely precise surgery on - for example - someone鈥檚 oesophagus, by controlling the robot from within the operating room.
So when you think about it, being able to perform surgery on something as small as a grape is a revolutionary thing in the world of medical science.
Although the image of a grape going under the knife is still pretty funny.