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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Part of the problem is that the word holism has become scientifically defiled. It has become synonymous with the mushing of everything we understand into a malfunctioning, soft-bladed (and soft-headed) blender. To rephrase Orwell: one equation good; four equations bad.

But genes are lifeless without cells. The real “raw material” of the human body is not information, but the way that information is enlivened, decoded, transformed, and integrated—i.e., by cells.