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

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think, sometimes, of a legend. Bali, a demon king, has conquered three worlds—the earth, the underworld, and the heavens. A tiny man with smoky eyes and an umbrella, Vamana—Vishnu’s avatar—appears before him and asks him to grant him a single wish. His arrogance inflated into munificence, Bali, the demon king, agrees. Vamana asks for something ludicrously small: a square plot of land whose edges are defined by the distance that he might cover in three strides. The man is—what—two arm lengths tall? He wants a few square feet of a kingdom that stretches to infinity? Bali laughs it off; yes, of course, the little man can have his little plot of land. And then, as Bali watches in terror, Vamana expands. His body arches exponentially through the skies. His first step crosses the entire Earth. His second stretches across the heavens; the third arcs over the netherworld. There is no more kingdom to grant. He plants his foot on Bali’s head and pushes him into the lower reaches of hell.