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The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Start date: March 1, 2023

Finish date: March 31, 2023

Discussion: Book Club 2023

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Apr 08, 2023 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science, academic-notations, favorites, non-fiction

‘The Song of the Cell’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee is dense with history and science. By necessity, it must be read slowly. The effort is worth it!

I have copied the book blurb:

”Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences!

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 o ‘The Song of the Cell’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee is dense with history and science. By necessity, it must be read slowly. The effort is worth it!

I have copied the book blurb:

”Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences!

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 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).”

The parts are:

-Discovery
-The One and the Many
-Blood
-Knowledge
-Organs
-Rebirth

There are Notes, Bibliography and Index sections, along with a picture section of the various scientists who discovered a vital part or function of the cell.

I suggest reading the book Immune: a Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive as a complementary text because it includes a lot of drawings of the cell parts that Mukherjee describes in depth. Between reading these two books, I figured out my husband almost died from double pneumonia ten years ago because he has a fantastic immune system. He was a victim of a cytokine storm, I think. In the 45 years we’ve been married, he’s had maybe four colds until he began his 7th decade. He’s never been sick with any other diseases at all. When younger, if he got sick, he went to bed and slept. Six hours later he’d get up without any signs of the cold. However, since his fight with double pneumonia, he’s been coming down with a cold at least once a year. He is really sick for a week. Needless to say, he can’t believe he’s become mortal at last. However, he has NEVER had Covid.

I, on the other hand, catch every damn cold virus going around since I was a toddler. I’ve also had the measles - twice - chicken pox (and now mild cases of occasional attacks of shingles, despite two different jab series of shingle formulas), etc etc etc. They pull my vitality levels down mildly to moderately, and slowly go away, for weeks. My immune system seemingly behaves in a very sluggish, slow-witted manner. I’ve caught Covid twice, so far (I and my husband have been immunized, so I felt like I had a mild cold).

I don’t know if the quick or slow recovery times have anything to do with the differences in how he and I respond to viruses or bacterial disease, now that he has become susceptible. When he becomes sick with a cold, he is almost bedridden, utterly exhausted for two or three days. Then he becomes antsy and bored for a few more days, then he is fine. I resign myself to sniffling and coughing resentfully for weeks - weeks! - while I am shuffling slowly through my daily responsibilities. Why resentfully? Because he ALWAYS appears to get sick first now! Within hours of his feeling terrible suddenly, a multitude of symptoms burst out and he is down. Yes, alright, it might be I am sick first before him and I don’t know it. My immune system (and my body, frankly) is a slow-burn tortoise coming and going. For a couple of weeks I feel off, then symptoms slowly blossom (first, maybe a sore throat for a few days, I think maybe it’s allergies?, next maybe a slight cough- maybe asthma? -I never think maybe a cold). His body reacts to disease as if he were a roadrunner striking an unexpected wall that suddenly flattens him without any previous warning signs (his body is always busy busy busy anyway, he can’t sit through a movie). He appears to be the bad guy that brought the illness home. I’m ok with that. ...more

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Nov 22, 2022 CatReader rated it really liked it

Shelves: cc

As a physician and a scientist who's published some well-cited works in cancer biology, I'm not really the target audience for this book (it's written more for the science-curious layperson), and didn't really gain additional insights. Still, Mukherjee is one of the premier medical writers of the decade and has a gift for captivating prose. I most enjoyed hearing about his scientific journey and his various mentors, both historical and contemporary. ...more

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