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“Each cell leads a double life,” Schleiden would write a year later, “an entirely independent one, belonging to its own development alone; and an incidental one, in so far as it has become part of a plant.”
A life within a life. An independent living being—a unit—that forms a part of the whole. A living building block contained within the larger living being.
a universal and essential scientific truth: both animals and plants had a “common means of formation through cells.”
The acuity of their insight was in the proposition that a deep unity of organization and function ran through living beings. “A bond of union” connects the different branches of life,
This book is the story of the cell.
It’s a story of how cooperative, organized accumulations of these autonomous living units—tissues, organs, and organ systems—enable profound forms of physiology: immunity, reproduction, sentience, cognition, repair, and rejuvenation.
Conversely, it is the story of what happens when cells become dysfunctional, tipping our bodies from cellular physiology into cellular pathology—the malfunctioning of cells precipitating the malfunction of the body.
And finally, it is a story about how our deepening understanding of cellular physiology and pathology has sparked a revolution in biology and medicine, leading to the birth of transformational medicine...
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We are built out of cellular units. Our vulnerabilities are built out of the vulnerabilities of cells. Our capacity to engineer or manipulate cells (immune cells, in both Sam’s and Emily’s cases) has become the basis of a new kind of medicine—albeit a kind of medicine that is still in midbirth.
how to balance a T cell’s attack on cancer and an attack on the self.
Complex living organisms were assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units—living compartments, if you will, or “living atoms,” as the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek called them in 1676. Humans were ecosystems of these living units. We were pixelated assemblages, composites, our existence the result of a cooperative agglomeration. We were a sum of parts.
The discovery of cells, and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem, also announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells.
first is the use of drugs, chemical substances, or physical stimulation to alter the properties of cells—their interactions with one another, their intercommunication, and their behavior. Antibiotics against germs, chemotherapy and immunotherapy for cancer, and the stimulation of neurons with electrodes to modulate nerve cell circuits in the brain fall in this first category.
second is the transfer of cells from body to body (including back into our own bodies), exemplified by blood transfusions, bone marrow transplantation, and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
third is the use of cells to synthesize a substance—insulin or antibodies—that produces a thera...
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fourth category: the genetic modification of cells, followed by transplantation, to create cells, organs, and bod...
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What is a cell, anyway? In a narrow sense, a cell is an autonomous living unit that acts as a decoding machine for a gene.
Genes provide instructions—code, if you will—to build proteins, the molecules that perform virtually all the work in a cell.
Proteins enable biological reactions, coordinate signals within the cell, form its structural elements, and turn genes on and off to regulate a cell’s identity, metabolism, growth, and death. They are the central function...
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Genes, which carry the codes to build proteins, are physically located in a double-stranded, helical molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which is further packaged in human ce...
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DNA is present inside every living cell (unless it has been eje...
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a gene carries the code; a cell deciphers that code.
the city of Oxford was always dimly lit (if cloudless Italy was a land made for telescopes, then foggy, dark England seemed custom-made for microscopes)—and
viruses are inert, lifeless, without cells.
“True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance,”
On May 26, 1675, the city of Delft was inundated by a storm. Leeuwenhoek, then forty-two, gathered some of the water from the drains of his rooftop, let it stand for a day, and then put a droplet under one of his microscopes and held it up to the light. He was instantly entranced. No one he knew had seen anything like it. The water was roiling with dozens of kinds of tiny organisms—“animalcules,” he called them.
“No greater pleasure has yet come to my eye than these spectacle of the thousands of living creatures in a drop of water.”II
Suspended in mid-pandemic limbo, I chose to build my own microscope, or at least the closest version that I could create.
