Editorial Content for The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
As I write on a very cold, blustery Canadian winter morning, millions of tiny processes are going on inside my body, doing the myriad things needed to keep me alive without my even having to think about it. As you read this, they’re going on inside your body, too.The responsible protagonists are cells, the smallest self-contained organisms we know of (so far). Every living thing, sentient or otherwise, is comprised of these amazing and infinitely variable microscopic entities.
In THE SONG OF THE CELL, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee adds to a remarkable medical trilogy that began with THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES (2010), a ground-breaking reveal about cancer and the eternal quest for a cure, followed by THE LAWS OF MEDICINE: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (2015) and THE GENE (2016), which brought mindful non-scientific readers up close and personal with DNA, the enigmatic code of life. What better follow-up than this remarkable journey through the “rooms” (literally, how cells got their name) in which DNA lives?
"To say that THE SONG OF THE CELL reads like an outstanding novel is no slight praise for such a purposeful and mind-changing scientific book."
Known for his colorful, clever and even rhapsodic prose, Mukherjee is anything but ephemeral when it comes to unpacking the voluminous yet fraught history and science of cellular biology. He’s also a proven master of the precision that you’d find in a core curriculum medical textbook. That rare combination of imaginative appeal and fact-filled authority is in itself a stroke of genius when it comes to a subject as complex and all-encompassing as the very building blocks of humanity.
In THE SONG OF THE CELL, Mukherjee basically acts as an extremely intuitive and empathic tour guide, who at every step seeks to smarten us up rather than dumb us down. For most of some two-dozen illustrated chapters, he includes the word “cell,” preceded by a compelling adjective that hints at the next theme on the journey: The Visible Cell, The Tampered Cell, The Organized Cell, The Defending Cell, The Contemplating Cell, The Selfish Cell and so on, like the refrain in a song, the refrain of his title.
And yes, such descriptions do give these microscopic entities a slight hint of “personality,” but what Mukherjee is really doing is dissolving barriers of intellectual intimidation that ordinarily would keep most of us from even contemplating such a book.
Then, just as we’re comfortably immersed in the rhythm of THE SONG OF THE CELL, there is a sudden break in the flow, a change of key. Mukherjee temporarily abandons his picturesque chapter pattern with a deep dive into The Pandemic. COVID-19 interrupted and even threatened the completion of his work on the book, just as it interrupted and re-shaped everyone else’s life. While all the other chapters are grouped into five distinct parts, or legs of the cellular journey, a dozen or so pages devoted to the ongoing pandemic and its seemingly myriad mutations are given a separate part.
It is here where Mukherjee candidly reveals his vulnerability, describing how he fell into a deep depression, partly from the medical devastation he experienced all around him as a practicing oncologist, partly from the effects of being torn away from a project that had ignited his passion and energy. But with profound self-care and faith in his purpose, another 200 pages were birthed to bring THE SONG OF THE CELL to a very powerful resting chord. But it’s not a final cadence by any means.
Just as in his previous medical bestsellers, Mukherjee orchestrates a vast but accessible compendium of knowledge to remind us that everything we know about the human organism is how we open doors to new knowledge we can’t even imagine yet. To say that THE SONG OF THE CELL reads like an outstanding novel is no slight praise for such a purposeful and mind-changing scientific book. One can only hope that Mukherjee applies his Shakespearean eloquence and remarkable research skills to producing more like it.
Teaser
In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves --- hearts, blood, brains --- are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells.” In THE SONG OF THE CELL, Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
Promo
In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves --- hearts, blood, brains --- are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells.” In THE SONG OF THE CELL, Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans.
About the Book
In THE SONG OF THE CELL, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES and the #1 New York Times bestseller THE GENE “blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner” (Oprah Daily).
Siddhartha Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves --- hearts, blood, brains --- are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells.”
The discovery of cells --- and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem --- announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia --- all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.
Filled with writing so vivid, lucid and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, THE SONG OF THE CELL tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor and a prolific reader, THE SONG OF THE CELL is both panoramic and intimate --- a masterpiece on what it means to be human.
“In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes” (The New Yorker).
Audiobook available, read by Dennis Boutsikaris
