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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the 1950s and 1960s, medicine and surgery witnessed an explosion of organ-directed therapies: rerouting blood vessels in a heart to bypass a blockage, or replacing a diseased kidney with a transplanted organ. A new universe of drugs emerged—antibiotics, antibodies, chemicals to prevent blood clots or reduce cholesterol. But this is organelle-directed therapy: the replenishment of a functional deficiency in the mitochondrion of a retinal ganglion cell. It represents the culmination of decades of study of cellular anatomy, the dissection of subcellular compartments, and the characterization of their dysfunction in diseased states. It is gene therapy, of course, but also cell therapy in situ—in other words, the restoration of function of a diseased cell in its native anatomical location in the human body.