The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, about the fundamental unit of life. Rich with Mukherjee's revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration of what it means to be human
Siddhartha Mukherjee is published in 38 languages, has won a Pulitzer amongst many prizes and The Emperor of All Maladies is one of TIME magazine's 100 Best Non-Fiction books of all time. The Observer said about it 'The notion of popular science doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature.' Shot through with a bright thread of experience as a practising physician, his books are grand stories about medicine, science and the human body.
This book is the story of the cell - past, present and future. Since the discovery of the cell in the 1660s and the discovery in the 1850s that most diseases can be traced back to our cells, human beings have been understood as an ecosystem of units that produce exponentially complex structures and effects.
How did we discover these units, and their functions? How did we begin to understand hearts, brains, kidneys as collections of cooperating cells? What are cells anyway? How do they work, and how (why?) do they work together? Why build organs and organisms out of these units?
And could we re-assemble a new kind of human? Could we alter cells to become resistant to diseases? Could we make new humans out of new kinds cells, endowed with novel properties, functions or intentions?
This book is about the building block of life - the cell. Its story is the story of modern medicine.
Review
Marie Matteson
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee returns with The Song of the Cell, his third work on the exploration of medicine and the human body. As Mukherjee states simply in his introduction, it is an attempt to understand ‘life in terms of its simplest unit – the cell’.
In pursuit of this understanding, Mukherjee conjures a thrilling narrative of historical scientific discovery. Mukherjee’s own excitement at the revelatory moment in which 17th-century Dutch merchant and inventor Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek discovers ‘animalcules’ in standing rainwater suffuses the book, generating the same excitement in the reader.
This is not just a tale of scientific discovery though. It is a book about medicine and about healing. Divided into six parts each containing sub-chapters, The Song of the Cell appears to be on a triumphant march – Part 1: Discovery; Part 2: The One and the Many; Part 3: Blood – and then the record scratches. Part 4: Knowledge is just 15 pages long and its lone sub-chapter is entitled ‘Pandemic’. Here, Mukherjee conveys so evocatively the wrenching dislocation of realising what we don’t know about medicine, and what we still need to learn about the human body.
Mukherjee deftly combines the thrill of life-changing scientific discovery with the experience of treating patients in a rollicking and yet deeply reflective story of the most essential building block of life itself: the cell and the curiosity to understand it.
The gift of this book is Mukherjee’s skill in drawing us all into the collective endeavour to understand the world and ourselves, and to work towards healing ourselves.
Marie Matteson is from Readings Carlton
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