The cell song
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Notary, $32.50
In the summer of 1960, doctors removed “crimson slime” from the bones of 6-year-old Barbara Lowry and gave it to her twin.
That surgery, one of the first successful bone marrow transplants, belied the difficulty of the procedure. In the early years of transplantation, dozens of patients died as doctors struggled to figure out how to use cells from one person to treat another. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in his new book, The cell song.
The transplant story is one of many that Mukherjee uses to put human faces and experiences at the heart of medical progress. But what radiates from the pages is the author himself. Oncologist, researcher, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and wisdom add energy to what, in less dexterous hands, might be dry matter. He finds wonder in all facets of cell biology, inspiration in the people who work in this field, and “creepy wonder” in his discoveries.
It’s no surprise that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. This is a man who built a microscope from scratch during the pandemic and has spent years researching biology and its history with luminaries in the field. The cell song allows readers to eavesdrop on these conversations, which can be intimate and illuminating.
On a road trip through the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with a geneticist paul nursewho tells him about the cell division work that ultimately earned Nurse a Nobel Prize (SN: 03/27/21, pg. 28). Walking in the Rockefeller University of New York
City, Mukherjee talks about his depression with another Nobel Prize-winning researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. The vivid images of Mukherjee give weight to her feelings. He tells Greengard that he experienced a “thick fog of grief” after his father’s death and describes “drowning in a tidal wave of sadness”.
In these memories, which Mukherjee uses to cross over to the science of depression, and elsewhere in the book, hints of poetry shine through the prose. A cell seen under a microscope is “bright, bright, alive.” The slow advance of a white blood cell is like the “ectoplasmic movement of an alien”. Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the history of cell biology, guiding readers through the lives and discoveries of key figures in the field. We meet the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th-century cloth merchant who ground globules of Venetian glass into microscope lenses and spied a “wonderful cosmos of a living world” inside a drop of rain. Mukherjee also teleports us to the present to introduce He Jiankui, the disgraced biophysicist behind The world’s first gene-edited babies. (SN: 12/22/18 and 1/5/19, pg. twenty). Along the way, we also meet Frances Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration medical officer who refused to approve thalidomide, a drug now known to cause birth defects, for use in the United States, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and other organelles were once free-living bacteria (SN: 8/8/15, pg. 22).
Mukherjee traverses a vast landscape of cell biology, and she’s not afraid to stop and explore the undergrowth. He describes in detail the flow of ions in nerve cells and presents a considerable cast of characters of the immune system. For an even deeper dive, readers can check out the footnotes; they are abundant
What stands out most, however, are Mukherjee’s stories about people: scientists, doctors, patients, and himself. As a researcher and physician, he deftly navigates between the scientific and clinical worlds and, like the microscope he assembled, offers insight into a universe we could not otherwise see.
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