The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, $32.50
In the summer of 1960, doctors extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin.
This surgery was one of the first successful bone-marrow transplants. In the early years of transplantation, scores of patients died as doctors struggled to figure out how to use one person’s cells to treat another. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new book, The Song of the Cell.
Mukherjee’s transplant story is just one example of the many ways he uses to place human experiences and faces at the center of medical progress. The author shines through the pages, but it is his personality that shines. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and wisdom add pep to what, in less dexterous hands, might be dry material. He finds wonder in every facet of cell biology, inspiration in the people working in this field and “spine-tingling awe” in their discoveries.
It’s no surprise that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. Mukherjee, who created a microscope from scratch during the pandemic, has spent many years studying biology and its history alongside luminaries in the field. The Song of the Cell These conversations can be intimate and insightful, so readers can listen in.
Mukherjee talks to a geneticist while driving across the Netherlands in a car Paul NurseHe tells him about cell division work that eventually earned Nurse the Nobel Prize.SN: 3/27/21, p. 28). A walk at Rockefeller University, New York
City, Mukherjee discusses his depression with another Nobel Prize–winning researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. Mukherjee’s vivid imagery lends heft to his feelings. He tells Greengard about experiencing a “soupy fog of grief” after his father’s death and describes “drowning in a tide of sadness.”
These memories are used to introduce Mukherjee into the science behind depression. In the book, there are hints of poetry woven in amongst the prose. A cell observed under a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A white blood cell’s slow creep is like the “ectoplasmic movement of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the story 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 “marvelous cosmos of a living world” within a raindrop. Mukherjee also transports us to the future to introduce He Jiankui the disgraced biophysicist. the world’s first gene-edited babies (SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20). We meet Frances Kelsey the Food and Drug Administration Medical Officer who rejected thalidomide’s use in the United States. Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist, also appears along the way. Previously, mitochondria and other organelles could not have been free-living bacteria. (SN: 8/8/15, p. 22).
Mukherjee traverses a vast landscape of cell biology, and he’s not afraid to pull over and go exploring in the weeds. He explains the flux of ions within nerve cells in great detail and introduces an extensive cast of immune system characters. The footnotes provide a deeper dive.
What stands out most, though, are Mukherjee’s stories about people: scientists, doctors, patients and himself. He is both a doctor and researcher, and can seamlessly move between clinical and scientific worlds. His stories about people, just like the microscope he built, offer a glimpse into a world we might not otherwise be able to see.
Buy The Song of the Cell Bookshop.org Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.
