The Song of the Cell
An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Published on 25. October 2022
496 pages
978-1-9821-1737-5 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize!
Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!
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).
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).
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10/2023
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Person
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell, The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Prelude: "The Elementary Particles of Organisms"
- Introduction: "We Shall Always Return to the Cell"
- Part One: Discovery
- 1. The Original Cell: An Invisible World
- 2. The Visible Cell: "Fictitious Stories About the Little Animals"
- 3. The Universal Cell: "The Smallest Particle of This Little World"
- 4. The Pathogenic Cell: Microbes, Infections, and the Antibiotic Revolution
- Part Two: The One and the Many
- 5. The Organized Cell: The Interior Anatomy of the Cell
- 6. The Dividing Cell: Cellular Reproduction and the Birth of IVF
- 7. The Tampered Cell: Lulu, Nana, and the Transgressions of Trust
- 8. The Developing Cell: A Cell Becomes an Organism
- Part Three: Blood
- 9. The Restless Cell: Circles of Blood
- 10. The Healing Cell: Platelets, Clots, and a "Modern Epidemic"
- 11. The Guardian Cell: Neutrophils and Their Kampf Against Pathogens
- 12. The Defending Cell: When a Body Meets a Body
- 13. The Discerning Cell: The Subtle Intelligence of the T Cell
- 14. The Tolerant Cell: The Self, Horror Autotoxicus, and Immunotherapy
- Part Four: Knowledge
- 15. The Pandemic
- Part Five: Organs
- 16. The Citizen Cell: The Benefits of Belonging
- 17. The Contemplating Cell: The Many-Minded Neuron
- 18. The Orchestrating Cell: Homeostasis, Fixity, and Balance
- Part Six: Rebirth
- 19. The Renewing Cell: Stem Cells and the Birth of Transplantation
- 20. The Repairing Cell: Injury, Decay, and Constancy
- 21. The Selfish Cell: The Ecological Equation and Cancer
- 22. The Songs of the Cell
- Epilogue: "Better Versions of Me"
- Photographs
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Image Credits
- Copyright
